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by Nadia Sussman 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. When Brian and Susie Hill bought a historic house on Cattail Creek in Yancey County, North Carolina, in 2023, they planned to stay forever. Their daughter, Lucy, would chase fireflies in the evenings across their wide expanse of grass. “It’s that feeling that you always wanted of going home,” Susie said. “Your little family and your little dog and your big yard and the chickens.” In September 2024, Hurricane Helene upended their lives. After days of rain that saturated the mountains, Helene arrived, turning little streams into raging rivers hundreds of miles inland. The swollen Cattail Creek churned through the Hills’ home, leaving logs in place of furniture and taking porches, doors, windows, appliances and parts of the floor with it. The Hills watched it all, huddled in their truck parked up a gentle slope. When the water receded, they found the house was uninhabitable. Suddenly displaced, the Hills began the arduous process of seeking disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The almost $40,000 in federal aid they received allowed them to take critical first steps toward rebuilding. It wasn’t nearly enough money to complete the enormous project. The rest would have to come from their own efforts and an outpouring of community support. Yet it was more than most others in their community managed to muster from the federal disaster aid system. ProPublica and The Assembly examined federal data, looking at the 10 counties in North Carolina hardest hit by Helene. We found income disparities in the way the agency had distributed housing assistance, even though that aid is supposed to be independent of income. Among the more rural counties hardest hit by Helene, households that got the most FEMA aid tended to be the highest-income ones. In some counties, including Yancey, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money to repair and rebuild their homes as those with lower incomes. In rural areas, residents can face barriers to seeking assistance ranging from poor access to cellphone and internet service to rugged topography to a lack of money to pay for services. The reverse was true in urban Buncombe County, home of Asheville, where lower-income homeowners typically received higher FEMA awards for housing assistance. Buncombe is also home to many of the region’s nonprofits that helped low-income residents navigate the FEMA application and appeals process. For the Hills, it’s been an exhausting year. They’ve been camped in a trailer since January with a view of their former home, working on the house until dark after days of teaching public school. They long for simple comforts of their former life — just sitting in their living room as a family and watching a movie. As the Hills prepare to move back in, we learn in their journey why so many other families may never be able to do so. Watch the short documentary “Rebuilding After Helene” here. Correction Sept. 27, 2025: A video with this story originally misidentified the subject Brian Hill teaches. Hill teaches high school math, not history.

by Ren Larson, The Assembly, and Cassandra Garibay, ProPublica ProPublica and The Assembly have been reporting on the impact of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, and we know recovery is far from over. We want to hear from North Carolinians whose homes were damaged or destroyed to better understand how well the state housing recovery program, RenewNC, is working for those who need it. If you’ve applied for funding to repair or rebuild your home, let us know what the process has been like, the challenges you’ve experienced and the impact that’s had on your life. We’d also like to hear from you if your home was damaged but you haven’t applied to understand why. Filling out the form below is the easiest way to share information with us. If you have anything else you would like to share, let us know at helenetips@propublica.org. After you submit your response, Assembly reporter Ren Larson or ProPublica reporter Cassandra Garibay may follow up for more details.

by Max Blau 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 H-2A visa program has long been touted as a way to ensure that farmers can access enough workers without hiring people who are undocumented. But for some migrant farmworkers seeking better-paying jobs in America, their seasonal gigs have morphed into a nightmare. As a recent ProPublica story revealed, the promises of the H-2A visa program can be undermined by extreme abuses the workers suffer, mostly by labor contractors. Some workers have had their wages stolen and been threatened with deportation if they complain about unsafe work conditions, a federal investigation found. In the worst instances, others have been assaulted or raped or have even died. It’s gotten so bad that, in one of the largest H-2A criminal cases ever, a federal judge described the abuse of these workers as a form of modern-day slavery. And without further changes to the H-2A program, experts told ProPublica, foreign farmworkers may continue to be harmed. With the U.S. facing a drastic shortage of domestic farmworkers and as the Trump administration deports more undocumented immigrants, experts told ProPublica that H-2A visas are certain to remain in high demand. One agricultural economist forecasts that, by 2030, there could be a need for up to 500,000 H-2A workers — roughly triple the number requested in 2016, the year that President Donald Trump was first elected. Experts, lawyers and advocates told ProPublica that, unless more is done to protect workers, the instances of abuse and exploitation are likely to increase as well. They suggested a variety of ways to make the H-2A program safer and more humane. 1. Enforce the current rules better The H-2A program is supposed to provide fair wages, safe working conditions and free housing and transportation to workers. But experts said insufficient oversight has undermined the protections promised to visa holders. “The expectations are very clear,” said Cesar Escalante, a University of Georgia professor of agricultural and applied economics. “Even if we’re very clear on the regulations, the government has failed on the enforcement.” The U.S. Department of Labor each year investigates only a tiny fraction of farm employers. The number of investigations is scarce not because of a lack of potential violations. A report from the Government Accountability Office showed that 84% of the investigations conducted by federal regulators found at least one violation of rules designed to protect H-2A workers. Advocates see that high violation rate as an indication that regulators are missing even more abuses in the fields. Labor experts believe that the limited enforcement is largely due to limited resources. One of the main enforcers of H-2A rules, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, last year had one of the lowest levels of investigators since the H-2A program was launched in the 1980s, Rutgers University researchers found. Daniel Costa, an attorney and director of immigration with the think tank the Economic Policy Institute, has called on Congress to boost the division’s funding to allow its regulators to conduct more proactive investigations. Short of that, Costa warned, the H-2A program will continue to be a “breeding ground for abuses.” If the Trump administration’s proposed budget gets approved, it will make even further cuts to the Wage and Hour Division. That could mean fewer H-2A investigations moving forward. A Labor Department spokesperson did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment about its enforcement practices and the implications of the budget proposal. 2. Raise the stakes for farmers There have been calls not just to hold farmers more accountable for H-2A violations, but also to reward the ones who comply with labor laws. Advocacy groups like Centro de los Derechos del Migrante and United Farm Workers have called on farmers to be held liable for the illegal practices of the third-party recruiters they hire. Right now, there’s a bill proposed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers that would require farmers to stop working with recruiters who charged laborers an illegal fee to obtain an H-2A visa. And it would give regulators the ability to fine farmers for failing to do so. Since only a tiny fraction of employers who hire H-2A workers face severe consequences, human rights organizations also have urged regulators to suspend or ban more employers from the H-2A program. They say that’s particularly important for employers with a track record of violating workers’ rights. Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, believes that farmers should be rewarded for following the rules. He said the largest employers of H-2A workers generally are not the ones responsible for the worst violations. He thinks that regulators should create a TSA PreCheck-style program that would let law-abiding employers move through the process of getting approved for H-2A workers more quickly with fewer bureaucratic hurdles. And it could allow overworked regulators to focus on the most pressing problems. 3. Get corporations on board with stopping abuse There’s a growing movement centered on the idea that the power of consumers can be leveraged to end agricultural abuses. After years of demanding better pay and protections from individual farmers and buyers, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers — the anti-trafficking organization that uncovered the first examples of abuse in the massive federal case — launched the Fair Food Program in 2010. Under the program, corporate buyers such as supermarkets and fast-food chains sign legally binding agreements to buy ethically sourced crops. Participating buyers agree to purchase produce from farms that adhere to the program’s stringent set of protections for workers, let workers be informed about their rights by the CIW and allow independent auditors to investigate complaints from their fields. The buyers also agree to pay those growers a small premium that is passed down to their workers. If extreme abuses like forced labor are found on those farms, the buyers commit

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

by Yilun Cheng, Houston Chronicle ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Newsroom as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas. Billionaire Elon Musk is taking issue with a recent investigation by the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Newsroom that raised questions about a flood tunnel project he’s pitching to address Houston’s chronic flooding woes. But experts said his response, which he did not explain to the newsrooms, isn’t supported by facts or data. Last month, the newsrooms reported that Musk’s tunneling company, The Boring Co., has been lobbying elected officials for months to allow it to build tunnels under Houston for flood mitigation. Boring has proposed digging two 12-foot-wide tunnels beneath Buffalo Bayou — the main waterway running through central Houston — to carry stormwater out of neighborhoods and toward the Gulf of Mexico during major storms. Experts say, however, that larger tunnels, closer to 30 to 40 feet in diameter, could carry far more water and be more effective. Musk and representatives with Boring did not respond to interview requests or answer questions the newsrooms sent in advance of last month’s story about whether Boring’s smaller tunnels would be able to handle the scale of floodwater Houston is likely to encounter in the future. Instead, Musk waited until hours after the story published to post a response on X, the social media company he’s owned since 2022. “Boring Company tunnels will work and cost <10% of alternatives,” his Aug. 28 post read. “If more flow is needed, additional tunnels can be built and furthermore they can be route water from many parts of the city, not just one.” The post was written in response to a post on X from U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt, a Houston Republican who helped arrange private meetings with government officials in Harris County and across the state to sell them on Boring’s flood tunnel plan. Hunt also did not respond to questions from the newsrooms ahead of publication of the original story, but he weighed in on X after the story was published. “A lifelong Houstonian and Texas Congressman spoke to the smartest man on planet earth about solving a generational flooding issue in our city that no one else will fix,” Hunt wrote. Musk’s post offered no data or engineering explanation to back up his assertions. So the newsrooms examined his statements, comparing them against flood studies, and interviewed engineering experts, some of whom pointed out key technical and logistical challenges with the Boring plan. One of Musk’s claims is likely false, and the others are not yet possible to verify with certainty, according to the newsrooms’ examination. Again, when the newsrooms pressed Musk and Boring representatives to explain the tech billionaire’s claims, they did not respond. Nor did Hunt. Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park is visible from the roof of The Allen, a nearby condominium, in 2023. The bayou is the main waterway running through central Houston. (Kirk Sides/Houston Chronicle) Would Boring’s tunnels cost less than 10% of alternatives? Musk’s proposal carries a lower price tag than the estimated cost of the larger system the flood control district has spent years and millions of dollars studying. But that’s partly because the two are strikingly different proposals. Hunt’s team has said Boring’s Buffalo Bayou project would cost $760 million, according to internal communications obtained by the newsrooms through public records requests. The county’s flood control district, on the other hand, proposed in 2022 tunnels of 30 to 40 feet in diameter for that segment of the system at a price of about $4.6 billion. Since the project is still in the research phase, the county numbers are preliminary. But based on the figures available, Boring’s proposal would cost closer to one-sixth of the county’s estimate — not less than 10%, as Musk’s post suggested. So Musk seems to be exaggerating how much cheaper his system would be. Flood control experts also maintained that the reduced price is somewhat proportional to the reduced capacity of Boring’s narrower tunnels. Two 12-foot tunnels would provide less than one-fifth of the volume that a single 40-foot tunnel offers. That means they would divert less water from vulnerable areas than one large tunnel. Jim Blackburn, a Houston environmental lawyer and flood policy expert, said while Musk’s company deserves a fair hearing, cheaper does not automatically mean better. “If it’s a smaller tunnel, then I would expect it to cost less,” Blackburn said. “You’ve got to look at how much flood mitigation you get for the dollars you spend.” Emily Woodell, a spokesperson for the Harris County Flood Control District, said the agency needs more information before it can weigh in on any of Musk’s claims. “We’d have to do a lot of study before anything could even potentially move forward, so I wouldn’t want to speculate,” she said. “Until we have a project or another study, we’d point people to our website for the reports and data we’ve compiled to date.” Can additional tunnels be built for more water flow? Musk’s post said if more floodwater needs to be moved, more tunnels can be added. Engineers said it is not that simple. Larry Dunbar, a veteran water resources engineer who has advised Houston-area governmental agencies on drainage issues, said based on size alone, it would take about 11 of Boring’s tunnels to carry the same amount of water as one large tunnel. Lined up side by side, with enough room between them to keep the ground stable, the full system could span hundreds of feet. That would require securing rights to more land and building more access points for maintenance, he said. And each new phase of construction might bring another round of reviews and mobilization costs, Dunbar said, undercutting the speed and affordability that Boring has touted as key advantages of its proposal. “The issues start

by Willoughby Mariano, WBUR, with additional reporting by Todd Wallack, WBUR This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WBUR. Sign up for Dispatches to get ProPublica’s stories in your inbox every week. To keep up with the latest Boston news, sign up for WBUR’s morning newsletter. Seventeen years had passed by the time Boston police knocked on Louise’s door to say they had identified the man who allegedly raped and stabbed her in October 2005. The suspect was now a father of two, a possible serial rapist and likely beyond the reach of the law, investigators told her. Police had taken so long to identify him that they missed the state’s deadline to prosecute her case. In Massachusetts, the law says prosecutors have only 15 years to file charges after an alleged rape. Past that statute of limitations, it’s nearly impossible to bring charges. Still, prosecutors thought they might be able to move this particular case forward on a technicality. Louise was afraid. She had spent years reliving the terror of that night and battling drug use that spun out of control after the attack. At times she failed out of rehab programs or stayed in homeless shelters. (WBUR does not identify victims of sexual assault without their permission and agreed to identify Louise only by her middle name.) By 2022, she was 42, sober, living in her own apartment and raising two school-age sons. She could not slip back into her old ways. But, as the daughter of a Marine veteran, Louise believed she needed to fight: She felt her community would not be safe until her rapist was in prison. “You’ve got to stand for something,” Louise said. Past the 15-year deadline in Massachusetts, no DNA match, eyewitness testimony or even confession can give a rape victim a chance at facing an attacker in court. This statute of limitations places Massachusetts behind almost every other state in the country. A review of criminal codes by WBUR and ProPublica found that as many as 47 states allow more time to charge rapes or similar assaults of adults than Massachusetts. For example, Vermont and Maryland are among a number of states that have no deadline to file charges for rape. Other states like Montana and Texas extend their deadlines when there’s DNA evidence. In many states, Louise’s case could be decided in court on the strength of its evidence. But here, evidence would not matter. The case would be almost impossible to win. Lost Chances (Isabel Seliger for ProPublica) Law enforcement and rape crisis workers across Massachusetts said in interviews that they routinely encounter cases where no charges were filed before the state’s strict deadline. How often rape suspects avoid prosecution as a result is unclear. Massachusetts is unusual in that state victim privacy laws bar police from releasing incident reports of rape to the public. Unless a suspect is charged in court, it’s often difficult to find any official records about a rape. And even when someone is charged, police can still withhold information about what they did — or did not do — to identify and capture a suspected rapist. This makes it all but impossible for anyone outside law enforcement to scrutinize rapes that are past the deadline to prosecute. In order to understand the extent of cases lost to the statute of limitations, WBUR and ProPublica spoke to researchers, prosecutors and lawmakers. Rape crisis center leaders say survivors of sexual assaults that happened many years ago regularly ask whether the criminal legal system can help them. The Suffolk County district attorney’s office, one of the most populous jurisdictions in the state, is based in Boston and prosecuted Louise’s case. A longtime sex crimes prosecutor there said his office reviews several cases each year that it cannot pursue because of the statute of limitations. About two years ago, the Bristol County district attorney’s office identified 21 rapes that it could have prosecuted were it not for the statute of limitations. They came to light when the agency used a federal grant to analyze DNA evidence in rape cases that had not been fully tested when it was first collected. Bristol County District Attorney Thomas Quinn is one of the state’s few prosecutors who has spoken in favor of allowing charges after the deadline in cases with DNA evidence. “This is to rectify a wrong, if you will, or a process that didn’t work,” Quinn told WBUR. “These are serious charges. Women are being raped.” Details of Louise’s case only became public because Suffolk County prosecutors took the unusual step of filing charges even though they had missed the state’s charging deadline. This led to the release of some records about the rape that would otherwise have been shielded by the state’s privacy laws. Those records show that years before the deadline passed in Louise’s alleged rape, police had already gathered many of the clues they would later use to identify a suspect, but did not solve the case. Louise: His Name Is Ivan (Isabel Seliger for ProPublica) When she was 25, Louise’s life was starting to fall apart. She worked as a waitress and switchboard operator, and she was experimenting with drugs. In the overnight hours of Oct. 22, 2005, a man she had been friends with demanded payment for drugs he had given her, according to a court record, then coerced her into having sex with a stranger at a hotel to pay off the debt. After 2 a.m., the friend dropped her off in downtown Boston. If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, you can contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 or rainn.org. It was raining hard, the trains had stopped running and she wanted a ride to a friend’s house. That’s when she thought she saw a friendly face. The man who drove up to her in a Lexus SUV introduced himself as Ivan and said he knew her from UMass Boston, where

by Mila Koumpilova, Chalkbeat, and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica 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. Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the latest education news. This summer, worried parents called the principal at Chalmers Elementary on Chicago’s West Side to ask if the district had shuttered the school. They had noticed second-floor windows boarded up. But despite years of declining enrollment, the school wasn’t closing. It was undergoing major renovations. Students returning to Chalmers last month found an expansive new engineering space, computer lab and arts studio. The teachers who greeted them had received special training. A cache of new technology — 3D printers, computers and bee-shaped robots to teach students basic coding — offered fresh possibilities. The influx of dollars and attention has lifted hopes at Chalmers, with officials at Chicago Public Schools and City Hall testing the idea that investing in high-poverty schools can reverse enrollment losses. But it could take years and millions of dollars to see if it works. Chalmers, in the historic North Lawndale neighborhood, served about 210 students last year in a building with capacity for 600. Just around the corner, about 210 students populated Johnson Elementary on a campus meant for 480. The local high school, Collins Academy, was down to 200 students. The schools serve mostly Black and low-income students. The enrollment slide at the three schools and others in the area was partly the result of decisions by previous mayors and public school administrations who labeled North Lawndale’s schools as failing and opened new ones — many run by private entities — that drew families away. About a decade ago, the district closed and overhauled Collins and fired educators at Chalmers and Johnson who had built relationships with families and temporarily handed the schools over to a private operator to try to turn them around academically. All the while, families have been leaving the neighborhood or having fewer babies, creating demographic challenges outside school officials’ control. Across the district, overall enrollment dropped by 70,000 in the past decade. That decline meant some schools in North Lawndale and elsewhere became tiny, costly to run and unable to offer a rich student experience. Three of every 10 Chicago schools sit at least half-empty, and closing or merging them remains a political third rail. Chicago officials, faced with pressure from the teachers union and community groups, have not confronted this challenge. And, as Chalkbeat and ProPublica reported in June, for years the district has largely left chronically underenrolled schools to struggle. Now, CPS and the city — under new leadership — are backing a different, community-led approach: spending at least $40 million to transform Chalmers, Johnson and Collins into science, technology, engineering, art and math, or STEAM, academies. The money is covering building upgrades, professional development, new educator positions and technology in the initiative’s first two years. After years spent promoting better-resourced selective and magnet schools and opening up charters en masse, CPS is hoping to draw families back to the neighborhood schools that many of them abandoned. The district has held up the North Lawndale initiative as an example of working closely with local communities to find solutions to under-enrollment — and as a model for other Chicago neighborhoods that have experienced disinvestment and student losses. “When we are successful in having high-quality programs, what we know from history is that more children will want to come,” former CEO Pedro Martinez said at a press event at Collins last school year. Education experts say the North Lawndale experiment is promising, and locally, the project has drawn a lot of cheerleaders, roughly $1 million in philanthropic backing and no vocal opposition. But solving the city’s enrollment challenge by trying to attract families to neighborhood schools is a daunting and uncertain task. New science and technology programs the district launched in other neighborhoods in recent years have not always brought a surge of students. Chicago still maintains a robust system of school choice, and the school-age population continues to shrink. Without an influx of new students from outside of North Lawndale, growing the three schools could mean siphoning students from other schools with their own enrollment woes. Preliminary data a few weeks into the school year shows flat enrollment, but the project’s supporters say word about it is just getting out. A key challenge is ensuring the cash-strapped district keeps funding the new positions, staff training and facility upgrades after money for the first two years runs out. Ralph Martire, the executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, which has criticized the district’s spending in the past, says it’s tough to argue against programs that could boost student outcomes in high-poverty schools. “There’s never a good reason not to invest in the education of kids who’ve been traditionally underserved,” he said. “The impact on enrollment — that’s really hard to predict. I don’t know that we have the data to give a definitive answer.” In any case, given that the initiative took seven years to launch and that it came with a high price tag, it’s likely not a solution the Chicago school district can readily replicate in other neighborhoods grappling with underenrollment. “The question is how the district is supporting innovative models at scale, not how they’re supporting one-off alternatives alone,” said Carrie Hahnel, a school finance researcher with the nonprofit Bellwether. “Districts are trying all kinds of things — work-based learning, dual enrollment, themed academies, small schools within schools — and yet we still see these declines,” Hahnel said. “The education sector is really struggling right now to figure out what it takes to attract families.” Chalmers is one of three Chicago Public Schools in North Lawndale shifting to STEAM programming, which adds the arts and social studies to the traditional STEM focus of science, technology, engineering and

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. Last month, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order “guaranteeing fair banking for all Americans,” he served notice of a coming federal crackdown. Banks who have denied customers access to accounts, loans or credit cards “on the basis of political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities,” he said, would now feel the full force of government regulators. Violators could find themselves facing fines, consent decrees or “other disciplinary measures” in an effort to stamp out “politicized or unlawful debanking.” The cause hits close to home for the president, whose family business sued Capital One earlier this year, alleging, without providing evidence, that hundreds of its accounts were closed in the summer of 2021 “as a result of political discrimination.” Even so, the administration may find it difficult to enforce the president’s order for one simple reason: Seven months of aggressive cost-cutting and government downsizing has left the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the primary regulators that Trump tasked with carrying out his banking directive, a shell of an agency. In fact, CFPB leaders appointed by the president are awaiting final court approval to fire the majority of the bureau’s remaining staffers, a move that would leave just a skeleton crew in place and likely end dozens of investigations into alleged corporate malfeasance. Since February, most staffers have been under a stop-work order that has effectively stalled the bulk of its probes — including ones into debanking. Among them are investigations into why JPMorgan Chase and Citibank freeze and close bank accounts, respectively, according to people familiar with the matters. Work was also suspended on inquiries into whether two little-known companies that banks use to screen prospective customers have wrongly flagged some as too risky to serve, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss sensitive matters. Court records show that one of those firms, Regulatory DataCorp, provides reports on customers to Capital One — the very financial institution that Trump’s family business has accused of debanking. (A Capital One spokesperson declined to comment, but the bank has disputed the Trump business’s claims of political discrimination and moved to dismiss its lawsuit, writing in court papers that it was “false” that the bank closed Trump accounts because it disagreed with the president’s views.) In dismantling the CFPB, the Trump administration has portrayed the agency as an industry antagonist and an example of government overreach. But Luke Herrine, a consumer law expert at the University of Alabama School of Law, said that Trump officials, in their haste to shrink the federal bureaucracy, “didn’t really consider whether there were some aspects of the CFPB that might be useful for their projects and what they might have to do to preserve them.” In fact, days before he was sacked by the Trump administration, then-CFPB head Rohit Chopra told a gathering of the conservative Federalist Society that the government needed to do more on debanking and advocated for due process rights for customers as well as more “real, clear, bright-line prohibitions” on what information banks can use in deciding to freeze or close accounts. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. To be sure, Trump’s executive order directs a host of regulatory agencies to take action, and some of them, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, have already begun making changes to their bank examination processes to address the president’s concerns. But the CFPB is the only one that is specifically charged with protecting consumers, hundreds of whom file complaints each month alleging they’ve been denied access to the financial system. A spokesperson for the CFPB didn’t respond to an email and call seeking comment. But a recent decision by the agency sheds some light on how bureau officials may be interpreting Trump’s order. Last month, the CFPB cited the order as it dropped a Biden-era probe into a company that provided loans for customers to buy firearms and pets, saying the investigation was politically motivated; the services were marketed to conservatives and Donald Trump Jr. was a board member of the firm’s parent company. Though the company had previously reached deals with regulators in California and Massachusetts over its lending practices, the CFPB’s chief legal officer wrote in a recent letter that the case “represents precisely the kind of unconstitutional targeting” barred by Trump’s debanking directive. Banks make decisions about who to serve based on a number of factors, including the financial and reputational risks of doing business. They also must follow laws and rules requiring them to know their customers and prevent money laundering. But leaders in both political parties agree that Americans are sometimes unfairly denied credit or accounts by big financial institutions. The issue became something of a cause celebre in Republican circles after former President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice launched a crackdown on unscrupulous payday lenders and other high-risk businesses, in part by urging the payment processors and banks that provide those enterprises access to the financial system to be more diligent in looking for signs of fraud. The former president of the American Bankers Association asserted that the program was “compelling banks to deny service to unpopular but perfectly legal industries by threatening penalties,” a message that Republicans amplified as an example of Obama-era government overreach. Their argument gained steam when the firearms industry discovered its retailers had been listed as a high-risk merchant in an obscure FDIC newsletter, according to Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, who has written that the whole affair has taken on “symbolic and mythic proportions in partisan discourse about regulation.” Many conservative activists and party leaders now claim that some Republicans are being rejected as customers because of their politics — and even at the behest of