Unews

The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship. The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday , is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud. According to emails obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, DHS approached Texas officials in June about a pilot program to add the state’s driver license data, but it’s not clear if the state participated. Earlier this year, DHS added millions of Americans’ Social Security data to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system, allowing officials to use the tool to conduct bulk searches of voter rolls for the first time. According to the document filed Thursday, SAVE also rec...

It’s never been easy to qualify for Social Security disability benefits. Christopher Tincher knows this firsthand. Tincher began his working life in a coal mine in Aflex, Kentucky, as a teenager in the 1980s. As mines across the region shuttered, he turned to scraping grills at a Hardee’s, then cleaning office buildings at night, then stocking shelves and changing tires at a Walmart in Arkansas. Later, he was hired by a nearby town’s wastewater department. Often, he had to wade into sewage to fix equipment and clean out feces, needles and tampons entering the treatment facility. In 2017, some of that liquid got into his work boots, which didn’t fit properly and had caused blisters to form. It soaked into his flesh, infecting his right foot all the way to the bone. Doctors cut his leg off below the knee so the infection wouldn’t spread. Tincher was now a manual laborer on one leg, but he was denied disability benefits by the Social Security Administration the following year. On avera...

For decades, noxious, cancer-causing gases poured from some of the nation’s largest industrial polluters, seeping invisibly from cracks in antiquated pipes or billowing out of smokestacks in plumes that choked the communities nearby.  And for decades, the Environmental Protection Agency tracked those emissions not by monitoring the air but by relying on a kind of honor system. Companies were allowed to estimate their chemical pollution using methods that even the EPA conceded were often unreliable. In 2023, the EPA received irrefutable proof that these estimates were highly flawed. The agency had required 20 industrial facilities to temporarily install air monitors around their perimeters — known as fence-line monitoring — to see how bad the pollution actually was.  The results, compiled now for the first time by ProPublica, were shocking. In virtually every case, the actual emissions were higher — often much higher — than the estimates, ProPublica found. At one steel indu...