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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. For years, North Dakota’s mineral owners have said state officials have ignored their pleas for help as companies deduct money from their share of income from oil and gas production. Now, some state lawmakers agree they need to take action. Responding to a recent North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica investigation, more than a half-dozen said a committee should study the issue and propose solutions before the next legislative session in 2027. Others suggested changes to state law, including one proposal to prohibit deductions unless a lease specifically allows them and another that would require companies and royalty owners to renegotiate their contracts every few decades. The Legislature meets every other year. North Dakota lawmakers rejected proposals to protect private mineral owners in 2021 and 2023, and did not address the issue during this year’s session. “It will definitely come up in 2027,” said Sen. Chuck Walen, a Republican from New Town. “I don’t know what the outcome will be, but it will definitely be coming up.” North Dakota officials have taken steps to safeguard state-owned royalties. Since 1979, all state leases with oil and gas companies prohibit deductions. But that protection does not extend to leases that are negotiated by North Dakota’s estimated 300,000 private mineral owners. “I definitely think something has to be done, especially since the state has protected itself,” said Rep. Patrick Hatlestad, a Republican from Williston. “I think it needs to do something similar for its citizens.” Some lawmakers also have suggested they may need to make changes to the state’s postproduction royalty oversight program, created in 2023 to address minerals owners’ mounting frustration about postproduction deductions — the money companies withhold to cover the costs of processing and transporting minerals after they are extracted and before they are sold. That program has not alleviated concerns over postproduction deductions and, as of August, had not resolved any cases about that issue, the news organizations found. Why It Matters Mineral owners have the rights to oil and gas found underground. They can lease those rights to companies in exchange for a cut of the revenue when oil is produced, called a royalty. But while the leases have remained the same for decades, the industry has changed. Oil and gas are now sold farther from the well, and companies incur more transportation and other costs to get the products to the point of sale. The companies pass on a portion of those costs to mineral owners, which North Dakota courts have determined is usually legal unless a lease says otherwise. Most leases signed decades ago don’t explicitly mention postproduction deductions, and leases don’t expire unless oil production lapses. Deductions began surging in North Dakota about a decade ago. About 20% of royalties are deducted, on average, according to two estimates as well as interviews with royalty owners. That would have amounted to about $1 billion in 2023. Estimates provided by the North Dakota Petroleum Council suggest companies withhold at least hundreds of millions of dollars in North Dakota every year. Why Some Lawmakers Are Pushing for Change Several lawmakers, including Republican Rep. Don Longmuir, said that because the state’s legislative season is a relatively short 80 days, it’s important to have an interim legislative committee conduct a study and propose a solution ahead of the 2027 session. “We can’t wait until the session starts,” said Longmuir, of Stanley, in the oil-producing region of the state. “That’s something that you know really needs to happen before session starts, so that maybe they can come up with something.” Assigning a new study to an interim committee would require a directive from Senate Majority Leader David Hogue, chair of the Legislative Management Committee. Hogue, a Republican from Minot, said he “would consider it” and will likely make a decision in the next month or two. “I really need to do more self-education right now,” Hogue said. The recent series has raised “awareness that there is an issue out there,” he said. Sen. Dale Patten, who has served as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and would likely have influence over any legislation, said he is open to a formal legislative study but said it should be initiated only with input from the full Legislature. “I would be comfortable with taking a look at it and see if there’s a way to resolve it,” said Patten, a Republican from Watford City. Some lawmakers are already thinking about ways to address the issue in the next session. One lawmaker said he may introduce legislation that would limit the length of leases to 30 years. Republican Sen. Jeff Magrum, who represents Hazelton and has supported landowners on other issues, said he hopes limiting leases will give future generations of mineral owners the opportunity to renegotiate contracts and incentivize companies to be more mindful of how they treat North Dakotans. “I don’t think that’s right for someone that’s not even born yet to have to honor a contract that I signed today. It’s just not fair to them,” Magrum said. “Look at how times have changed. Everything’s changed and they’re stuck in the contract that was written in the 1950s.” Magrum has introduced 13 bills related to property rights issues in the past two legislative sessions. All but one failed. Rep. David Richter, a Republican from Williston, said he thinks it would be difficult for the Legislature to modify existing leases in that way, but it could limit the length of future leases. “Going forward, I think that might be an option worth taking a really hard look at,” Richter said. “But that doesn’t do anything to alleviate the situation of the leases that are already in place.” For those existing leases, Richter said it is often “unclear” whether deductions are permitted, and some lawmakers said

by Mario Ariza 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. Last October, Peter and Linda Kilfoil returned from an overnight trip and found water pooling in the kitchen of their Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home. The pair couldn’t pinpoint the source of the leak and had a hard time getting a plumber. So Linda Kilfoil called their insurer, Citizens Property Insurance Corp. The call was the beginning of the Kilfoils’ journey through an alternate legal universe set up by Citizens, a quasi-governmental insurer in Florida, to reduce its staggering legal costs. In this state-sanctioned world, the judges’ salaries are funded by Citizens, the rules followed in Florida’s circuit courts don’t all apply and the insurance company almost always triumphs. It’s a legal landscape so fraught that a Tampa judge recently paused all its proceedings — twice. But that didn’t come soon enough to help the Kilfoils. Citizens sent an adjuster to their home the day after they called. He couldn’t pinpoint the source of the leak either but suspected it was coming from a pipe that drained wastewater from the kitchen, he said later in a deposition. He snapped photos of the warped, soggy cabinets. A short while later, Citizens denied their claim, saying that the damage to their cabinets was consistent with a long-term leak, and that their insurance contract excluded coverage of such leaks — unless they were hidden. Eleven days after the denial, the Kilfoils’ plumber found the leaking pipe in the home’s exterior wall. It had been spilling water into a recess between their kitchen cabinets and slab foundation, records show. The total cost of repair has come close to $40,000, according to Linda Kilfoil and construction estimates provided by her attorney. The Kilfoils had permanently relocated to Florida from Long Island to enjoy retirement. But with Peter Kilfoil ill with prostate and skin cancer, his wife faced the prospect of handling repairs while tending to his health. “I am a former physician,” Peter Kilfoil said in an interview from the hospital. “I’m not like some carjacker. They accuse me of letting that leak persist until it destroyed my kitchen.” Just before Thanksgiving, the Kilfoils sued Citizens. Instead of going to circuit court, as most lawsuits against insurers would, Citizens routed their case to arbitration before the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings. On the surface, the change of venue — made possible by a provision lawmakers empowered Citizens to insert at the end of most of its policies — didn’t seem like a big deal. Legislators and Citizens executives touted DOAH as advantageous for both consumers and the insurer. Cases in the forum tend to move faster, cost less and are decided by expert administrative law judges rather than juries. But in practice, homeowners forced by Citizens into DOAH have trouble exercising key rights. Judge Britney Horton kept the Kilfoils’ lawyer from deposing a Citizens adjuster, siding with the company after it argued it had already made another employee available and produced “all non-privileged facts.” The ruling deprived them of a fair opportunity to investigate the denial, according to their attorney. On at least 20 other occasions, DOAH judges have issued similar rulings during a dispute’s fact-finding phase. Judge Britney Horton (State of Florida Division of Administrative Hearings) In addition, some DOAH judges have denied motions requesting that they disclose any potential conflicts they might have as arbitrators. Some plaintiff’s attorneys say that has made it difficult to trust in the impartiality of their decisions. And the forum’s rules make it impossible for homeowners to drop their lawsuit without Citizens’ approval, unless they withdraw their claim, a move that can lead to court costs and attorney’s fees if not filed early in the process. Some have felt forced to go to final hearings where they lost and ended up owing thousands to Citizens. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out something’s wrong,” said Chip Merlin, president of Merlin Law Group, a firm that represents insurance policyholders. In a written response to questions about the homeowners’ experiences, Citizens spokesperson Michael Peltier defended the current process. “We believe the statute authoring the resolution of claims by DOAH provides a well-established, impartial, and efficient process for policyholders, who no longer must wait nearly two years, on average, for a resolution of their claim,” he wrote. When it comes to depositions, the forum is not “materially different” from Florida’s circuit courts, he added. And he explained that while homeowners are barred from dismissing their cases at DOAH — a move that might allow them to pursue the claim in circuit court — they aren’t blocked from withdrawing their claim, a more terminal maneuver. (Withdrawing, though, grants Citizens an automatic win and exposes homeowners to the risk of fees if it is not done soon after a case is sent to DOAH.) The company declined to comment on individual cases in litigation. As of July 21, judges sided with Citizens in more than 90% of cases that made it to a final DOAH hearing where both sides presented their case, according to a ProPublica analysis of court records. (The steep odds were first highlighted by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.) In circuit court trials, Citizens has won about 55% of the time over the past five years, according to records released by the company. Citing a procedural error in the request by the Kilfoils’ lawyers, Horton declined to push back the date of the final hearing after Peter Kilfoil had been hospitalized. She did not respond to a request for comment. Faced with long odds and failing health, the Kilfoils settled their case for the nominal sum of $500 that Citizens was offering, according to their attorney. “I was being a nurse to my husband daily,” Linda Kilfoil said, leaving little time to manage home repairs and fight the insurer. “I couldn’t leave

by Max Blau, ProPublica, and Zaydee Sanchez for ProPublica, illustrations by Dadu Shin for ProPublica This story contains descriptions of sexual assaults. In the darkness before dawn, Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr. took the last drag of a cigarette and looked out from the staircase of a run-down motel. Underneath the stark floodlights streamed a procession of weary travelers in T-shirts and jeans, reaching into the bottom of a white coach bus for their oversize duffel bags. Mendoza had arranged for them to come on this 1,200-mile journey from northeastern Mexico to a rural stretch of Georgia’s blueberry country. Each of them had a work permit, which Mendoza had helped secure through a visa program called H-2A. More foreigners than ever before were using the decades-old program, which lets them work for months or even several years on U.S. farms. Farmers and politicians have touted H-2A as an easy answer to a persistent labor problem: Americans are abandoning agriculture jobs and U.S. immigration policies are restricting access to undocumented workers. As recently as last month, President Donald Trump has floated the idea that if undocumented farmworkers returned home, they could come back to the U.S. “with a pass” to “legally” re-enter the country. But over the years, the promises of H-2A — such as humane working conditions, free housing and far better wages than back home — have been undermined by the relative ease of exploiting workers due to scant oversight of the program. The busload of men and women who arrived that day in September 2018, like the others before and after, came with hopes of creating better lives for themselves and their families. Mendoza, through a network of recruiters in Mexico, had sold them on that hope. The recruiters touted the promises of a visa that, for many of them, would allow them to make more in a day than what they earned for a week of work in Mexico. From his perch on the staircase, Mendoza was surveying a scene that held great promise for him, too. The arrival of this batch of workers marked the beginning of his first big job as a labor broker and the end of any lingering thoughts that he’d end up like his own mother and father, who’d brought him as a toddler from Mexico. They’d scraped together a living baling pine straw and packing blueberries. Mendoza, now 21, also had spent some time working in the fields. But he went on to attend college, dropping out so that he could focus on what he calculated to be a more lucrative prospect. Around the time Mendoza was ramping up his business of bringing people over from Mexico, Georgia was more reliant on H-2A workers than any other state. He served as a gatekeeper, choosing which Mexican workers desperate for better pay would go to Georgia farms desperate for more laborers. Beyond that, though, he had other ambitions related to this work. And he had plans for one worker in particular among this early batch. Sofi was 24 and a single mother. She had experience working in the fields, having grown up in a close-knit farming family in a small town flanked by rows of corn and squash. But she came across more as a city girl, with her stylish clothes and penchant for pink lipstick. One of Mendoza’s recruiters in Mexico was a neighbor of Sofi’s family and assured him that she was a good worker. That part hardly mattered. The photo attached to her H-2A visa application drew him in. Mendoza began sending her flirtatious text messages. She brushed them off. He pressed on, telling her he’d waive most of the fee he charged people to apply for the visa. Sofi thought about it some more. Her father, who she trusted more than any man, had picked up seasonal farm work in the U.S. when she was a child, and she was aware of how much he appreciated the stable housing and steady pay. Though she worried about leaving her toddler son, she began to worry more about what would happen to him if she didn’t leave. The wages Mendoza offered could change her son’s future, or at the very least secure it the way her father had done for her. She owed her boy that much, she told herself. She would go. About the Sourcing The description of Sofi’s experience in the H-2A program is detailed in police records, court documents and testimony in federal court. Her name is redacted in federal filings to maintain her anonymity. We are identifying her by a first name she formerly used on social media. Mendoza declined multiple requests for an interview and did not provide comments in response to ProPublica’s letters detailing the case. But not long after she and the other workers arrived in Monterrey, Mexico, to board one of the buses Mendoza sent for them, she began to have doubts. One of Mendoza’s associates was waiting for them. The associate handed each worker a stack of cash. The way he explained it, the U.S. would question any large wire transfers from Mexico, so they would need to bring the money to their new boss. He told them not to put the money in their suitcases. U.S. officials were likely to check those. It would have to be on their bodies. He didn’t say much else, just that anyone who got caught would need to claim the cash as their own. So don’t get caught. The closer her bus crept to the border, the more nervous Sofi grew. She started tallying just how much money was hidden on the people riding the bus. She figured it was almost a quarter of a million dollars. The Deal With the Farmer In some regards, the deal Mendoza had struck with a blueberry farmer named Charles King was typical. Mendoza would ensure a steady supply of workers, recruiting them from across Mexico and Guatemala, assisting with their H-2A applications and arranging for their journey to