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Center for Public Integrity
How (and why) the GOP and a popular film are misleading you about migrant kids
Subscribe on Google | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon. At the start of 2023, the U.S. economy showed signs of recovery from a pandemic that had killed millions of Americans. President Joe Biden had successfully pushed key parts of his agenda through Congress during his first two years in office, including a celebrated $1.2 trillion package that aimed to rebuild the country’s decaying infrastructure and provide a massive economic stimulus.
Proposed law aims to lock in protections for homeless students
Months after a Center for Public Integrity investigation showed that Pennsylvania school districts locked children out of class while investigating their families’ claims of homelessness, a bill winding through the state legislature would make the practice illegal. In November, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation that would...
Not just the Supreme Court: Ethics troubles plague state high courts, too
Subscribe on Google | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon. Since 2015, a North Carolina Supreme Court justice has heard at least six cases involving the massive utility Duke Energy, a company in which he and his wife had a direct financial stake. In each of the cases, Paul Newby...
Gaps in social services are leaving homeless youth with ‘no good choices’
Subscribe on Google | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon. For months, he woke to the sound of cars. Sometimes the incessant roaring kept him up at night, but sleeping under an overpass was better than sleeping under nothing, so 19-year-old Israel Cook learned to manage. “No human should be...
The South is ‘the epicenter’ of a new HIV crisis. Medicaid expansion could help.
HIV is surging in the South, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has designated “the epicenter” of an emerging crisis particularly affecting seven states spanning from Texas to North Carolina. As last month’s gubernatorial election approached in Mississippi — which has the sixth-highest rate of...
District cites ‘educational larceny’ in aggressive audits of student housing
This story is republished in partnership with The Midwest Newsroom and St. Louis Public Radio. In March, a frustrated parent wrote an email to the Hazelwood School District. Her daughter had been kicked out of Jamestown Elementary School after the district conducted an investigation into where the family lived. In...
Millions of low-paid workers will benefit from this obscure new policy
It’s been a record year for labor strikes. Hollywood actors recently ended their historic, 118-day walkout. Thousands of auto workers in Detroit are returning to factories after more than 46 days on the picket lines. Their labor unions secured major gains during contract negotiations at a time when companies are struggling to find job candidates.
Environmental impact targeted in new push against ‘Cop City’
Opponents of the developing Atlanta Public Safety Training Center have adopted a new strategy to stop the so-called “Cop City” from being built. Activists filed a complaint with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of External Civil Rights Compliance last week, arguing that the 85-acre site in unincorporated southern DeKalb County is damaging the ecosystem in surrounding Black and brown neighborhoods. They contend that its construction is a potential violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that could compel the EPA to put a halt to construction.
How illustrations for a podcast about Black farmers came to life
The Center for Public Integrity’s third season of The Heist podcast, about the government’s long history undermining Black farmers, has powerful illustrations for each episode. Artist Amanda Howell Whitehurst created them. A painter and illustrator whose work often explores the “beauty, confidence, and strength” of Black women, she...
Black financial institutions face new threat following Supreme Court ruling
The Supreme Court’s decision this summer to strike down affirmative action in higher education has had a chilling effect on racial equity efforts in the public and private sectors. Long considered a tool to correct systemic discrimination, affirmative action programs everywhere are at risk, advocates worry. Now, conservative activists...
What backlash to landmark voting law tells us about debate today
Ronald Reagan praised the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as “vital.” Bill Clinton deemed it a “triumph.” George W. Bush said the law “broke the segregationist lock on the ballot box.”. When the U.S. Senate reauthorized the law most recently, in 2006, it passed by...
New USDA data shows declining loan delinquency rates
The share of federal agricultural loans with overdue payments is falling for farmers across racial and ethnic groups, though whether that’s a temporary improvement remains to be seen. A Center for Public Integrity analysis of a sliver of data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows the delinquency rate...
The fight for debt relief and legacy (transcript)
More than $400,000. Nearly half a million. That’s what Nate Bradford Jr. owed the USDA in 2010. He’d done his best to keep up on his loan payments — working the night shift at an off-farm job, spending his weekends and vacations trying to make his ranch profitable, investing his 401k into his business.
Another state refuses to cooperate with EPA on environmental justice
In the latest example of state pushback to civil-rights enforcement by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a Texas agency has pulled out of negotiations to resolve complaints alleging its decisions on pollution are racially discriminatory. EPA, which disclosed the development on its online docket Thursday with a letter dated Wednesday,...
See which states are expanding — or restricting — voting rights
While restoration of the federal Voting Rights Act languishes in a split Congress, an already deep divide in Americans’ access to voting has widened over the past year. In part, that’s because blue states aren’t waiting. According to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at...
EPA promised to address environmental racism. Then states pushed back.
FLINT, Mich. — Civil rights law offers a tool for communities of color trying to stop unequal exposure to pollution. Over and over, people here have tried to make it work. From 1992 to 2015, residents and community groups filed a series of federal complaints asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to intervene over pollution affecting majority Black neighborhoods, from a power plant to the city’s infamous lead-water crisis. Each time, they got little or nothing from the office charged with ensuring state environmental permitting agencies and other recipients of federal funding don’t discriminate.
Facing environmental discrimination? Read this before complaining to EPA
Is your neighborhood choked with pollution or facing other environmental woes that you think are discriminatory? You can write to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to request an intervention. But it’s easy to get tripped up. That’s what the Center for Public Integrity found as part of a new...
Why you should report on environmental justice — and how to get started
You don’t need to report on the environment to investigate environmental justice. The issue intersects with many other topics: politics, planning and zoning, budgets, business, community advocacy, road building, energy and more. And it cuts to the heart of equal opportunity. Does everyone in your region get to breathe...
Can USDA’s efforts on equity help Black farmers overcome ‘toxic debt’?
It was nearly a quarter century ago when thousands of Black farmers filed a class action discrimination lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to receive financial compensation. More than 15,000 got $50,000 lump sum payments, and a small number were approved for larger payments. Some had hoped that it would finally help them get out from under debt to the department.
The forever fight (transcript)
You know how, when someone is talking about something they really love, their passion comes through in their voice? How you can see in their eyes, their gestures, how important this thing is to them?. That’s what it’s like to talk to Eddie Slaughter about farming. Eddie Slaughter:...
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The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom investigating democracy, power and privilege. Our reporting focuses on the influence of money and the impact of inequality on our society.
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