Unews

Photography and text by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Mireya Sandia was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open. Her skin was pale, her white hair nearly gone. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer years earlier, and more recently it had spread to her brain and affected her speech. When we first met, in May, she waved me closer, grabbed my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and said, as best she could: “I want to see my son again.” Then she began to cry. With a knot in my throat, I held her hand, fearing that there would not be enough time for her to see her only son, Wilmer Vega Sandia. Her health was what led her son to migrate to the United States. His detention and later deportation to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, known as CECOT, had, in turn, led me to her bedroom in a small village in the Andes. Over the...

by Maya Miller and Jeremy Kohler ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. During his first term, President Donald Trump frequently turned to the issue of mental health, framing it as a national crisis that demanded action. He linked it to opioid addiction , mass shootings and a surge in veteran suicides — and he later used it to argue against COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures. At times, he backed up his rhetoric with action. His administration issued tens of millions of dollars in grants to expand community mental health services and continued funding contracts to help federal regulators enforce the parity law, which requires insurers to treat mental and physical health care equally. But just months after Trump returned to the presidency this year, his administration paused new rules issued in President Joe Biden’s final months that were designed to strengthen mental healt...

by ProPublica ProPublica announced that Ryan Little and Kevin Uhrmacher have been hired as deputy editors on our data and news applications teams. Little will serve as one of two deputy data editors, and Uhrmacher will work as deputy news applications editor. Together, they will strengthen ProPublica’s editing capacity and streamline collaboration between our data, interactive and reporting teams. “We’re so happy to have Ryan and Kevin joining us at ProPublica,” said Ken Schwencke, senior editor for data and news applications. “They are excellent managers and journalists, and we’re excited to bring them on to make the already-excellent journalism coming from these teams even better.” Little joins ProPublica from The Baltimore Banner, where he served as data editor and worked on stories that won a Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, among other honors. Those stories included a series revealing the city’s overdose crisis , an investiga...

by Jacob Orledge , North Dakota Monitor This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor . Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Millions of Americans own the rights to oil and gas underground. When they’re approached by an energy company to lease out those rights, they’re offered a cut of the revenue, called a royalty. “Royalties saved our place,” said James Horob, a farmer in northwest North Dakota, who used oil royalties to rescue his family’s farm from bankruptcy in 2008 and replace equipment that had been auctioned off. “We’re lucky to have what we got.” However, the royalty income that mineral owners like Horob get can depend in part on the state where they live. In North Dakota, estimates show that in recent years companies have been deducting hundreds of millions of dollars annually to help cover the costs incurred once oil and gas leave the ground on their way to being sold. North...

by Abe Streep ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches , a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. The top Democrat on a House committee is demanding that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins account for discrepancies between her public statements about wildland firefighter staffing and a ProPublica report showing there were thousands of vacancies in the Forest Service’s firefighting workforce as peak wildfire season approached. In June, the Forest Service claimed it had reached 99% of its hiring goal for its wildland firefighting workforce. But ProPublica’s reporting indicated that the agency was selectively counting firefighters, presenting an optimistic assessment to the public. As many as 27% of jobs were vacant as of July 17, according to data obtained by ProPublica. Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat from California and the ranking member of the Committee on Ove...

by Tony Schick , Oregon Public Broadcasting This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting . Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. During the outcry against nuclear power in the 1970s, liberal Oregon lawmakers hatched a plan to slow an industry that was just getting started. They created a burdensome process that gave the public increased say over where power plants could be built, and the leading anti-nuclear activists of the day used appeal after appeal to delay proposed nuclear plants to death. It had a huge impact: Oregon’s first commercial nuclear plant, the one that spurred lawmakers into action, was also the state’s last. What those lawmakers didn’t plan for was that 50 years later, an Oregon citizen activist would use that same bureaucracy to hinder some of the very energy projects that today’s liberals want: wind farms and the new high-voltage lines needed to support them. The...

by Lexi Churchill , ProPublica and The Texas Tribune , and Ellis Simani , ProPublica This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. For about eight years, a Houston private school has followed a unique pattern when appointing members to its governing board: It has selected only married couples. Over 200 miles away, two private schools in Dallas have awarded more than $7 million in combined contracts to their board members. And at least seven private schools across Texas have issued personal loans, often reaching $100,000 or more, to their school leaders under terms that are often hidden from public view. Such practices would typically violate laws governing public and charter schools. But private schools operate largely outside those rules because they haven’t historically received direct taxpayer dollars....

by Jake Pearson ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. A task force appointed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is recommending that the state spend at least $15 million per year and create state-level oversight to bolster its troubled guardianship system, in which judges assign individuals or organizations to care for some 30,000 residents deemed incapable of looking after their own affairs. If adopted, the plan would represent a major change in how the state government cares for some of its most vulnerable residents. New York currently budgets just $1 million to fund a guardianship hotline, and the legal arrangements receive little official oversight, with responsibility for people’s wellbeing spread among the courts, nonprofit organizations, private lawyers and companies. The policy proposal, contained in the state’s Master Plan for Aging , comes three years after Hochul, a Democrat,...