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Over the past month, the Trump administration has deployed thousands of federal immigration agents to the Minneapolis area. On Saturday, Jan. 24, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Pretti was the third person shot by federal agents in the area in January.  The Department of Homeland Security initially said an agent fired “defensive shots” after Pretti approached officers with a weapon, but video of the incident appears to contradict that claim. DHS said this week that two officers involved were placed on leave. In a press conference on Thursday , border czar Tom Homan said the administration is working on making the operation “safer, more efficient, by the book.” He said that agents will focus on “targeted, strategic enforcement operations” with a “prioritization on public safety threats.” Our photojournalists Cengiz Yar and Peter DiCampo were on the ground in Minneapolis, covering what they sa...

Two Alaska school districts filed a lawsuit on Jan. 20 in Anchorage Superior Court against the state, its governor and its education commissioner over what they say is a long-running failure to adequately fund public education. In the complaint, the Kuspuk School District and the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District argue “the state is failing to meet its constitutional obligation” to provide Alaska students “a sound basic education and meaningful opportunity for proficiency” in vital subjects, and to fund schools and school districts sufficiently to do that. The plaintiffs are seeking to force the state to fulfill its constitutional obligation and requesting a court-ordered study to determine what it costs to educate students. “Alaska, we don’t believe, has ever done an adequacy study to really understand what it would take to allow Alaska students a fair opportunity to learn the skills they need to participate and contribute to society,” said Matt Singer, a trial attorney...

New York state may soon guarantee homeless families placed in hotels the same services as those in shelters, including help finding housing, meals and child care. The proposal from the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance follows a ProPublica and New York Focus investigation that found hotels have become the state’s predominant response to homelessness outside of New York City. Counties had placed tens of thousands of adults and children in often-dilapidated hotels, the investigation found, and many people have been cut off from the services promised by the shelter system. The proposed regulations, published Wednesday, will go through a 60-day public comment period before OTDA, which oversees county social services offices, decides whether to adopt, change or drop them. Each county would be required to submit plans for delivering the support services as soon as the rules are adopted. Counties would also have to enforce limits on overcrowding and ensure that children don’t h...

On Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump took the podium at his inauguration and promised to halt unauthorized border crossings and “begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens to the places from which they came.” ProPublica and The Texas Tribune spent the first 12 months of Trump’s second term examining in real time how this drive to remove immigrants unfolded across the nation. We collected data the government wouldn’t provide or didn’t track, including how many U.S. citizens had been held by immigration agents . We investigated the crowd-control methods federal agents used in Los Angeles and Chicago and spoke to the families of immigrants that the government sent to Guantanamo . After the Trump administration flew more than 230 men to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador , we partnered with Venezuelan journalists to gather records and exclusive U.S. government data. The administration insisted these men were the “worst of the worst.” Our reporting ...

An Oklahoma state senator has introduced legislation to strengthen regulations on how oilfield wastewater is injected underground following an investigation by The Frontier and ProPublica . For the legislative session beginning Monday, Sen. Mary Boren, a Democrat and a member of the chamber’s Energy Committee, filed four oil and gas bills to curb industrial pollution or create more transparency for landowners. Laws to increase oversight of oil and gas production, one of the largest industries in the state, often face long odds in Oklahoma, though a few have passed in recent years. The bills would have to win support from leaders in the GOP-controlled Legislature and the state’s Republican governor over industry opposition. But Boren said that the threat to the state’s groundwater is too big to ignore. “My responsibility is to pay attention to things that could solve problems for real Oklahomans,” said Boren, who credited the investigation for calling attention to large-scale pollu...

The powerful owners of a payday lending company faced a crisis in March 2021 when their other business, a now-defunct sports gambling operation, was under investigation by Tennessee regulators. The couple, Michael and Tina Hodges, had already turned to Tennessee Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton in 2014 to create a new triple-digit interest loan called a “Flex Loan.” The couple’s company, Advance Financial, through the Flex Loan, went on to make hundreds of millions of dollars lending to the state’s most financially vulnerable. Now they needed Sexton’s help keeping their fledgling gambling business, Action 247, afloat as it tried to compete with sportsbooks like FanDuel and DraftKings, which were dominating the market in Tennessee and around the country. In many states, regulators try to keep lending and betting separate; Virginia, for example, bans gambling operators from offering loans to customers. But in Tennessee, it’s different. A payday lender and a gambling company can hav...