Anger is mounting among Republicans after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell revealed on Sunday that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into him, marking an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s public efforts to coerce Powell into lowering interest rates. “If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a scathing statement on Sunday. “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.”  Tillis then vowed to oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed until the legal matter is “fully resolved.” This includes the upcoming Chair vacancy as Powell is due to step down as Chair in May, though he may continue to serve on the board afterward.  Calling the investigation “nothing more than an attempt at coercion,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) appeared to go a step further, suggesting that it is the Justice Department that should be investigated—not Powell. “If the Department of Justice believes an investigation into Chair Powell is warranted based on project cost overruns—which are not unusual—then Congress needs to investigate the Department of Justice,” she added.  According to Powell, the Justice Department’s investigation relates to testimony he gave before the Senate Banking Committee last June about renovations of the Federal Reserve’s office headquarters in Washington. The costly renovations have prompted the president and his allies to baselessly suggest that fraud may have been committed. As Powell said in his video statement on Sunday, such assertions are widely viewed as a cover for Trump’s campaign to pressure Powell to cut interest rates and lower the cost of federal debt. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation,” Powell said in a rare video message.  Powell, a Republican who was first nominated as a member of the Federal Reserve board by Barack Obama and later promoted to Chair by Trump during his first term, vowed to continue his duty of public service, which “sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats.”   News of the criminal investigation comes as the Fed’s rate-setting meeting is scheduled to take place later this month, where it is expected to halt its recent rate cuts. Shortly after Powell’s announcement, Trump claimed in an interview with NBC News on Sunday that he did not have any knowledge of the DOJ’s investigation into the Federal Reserve. The president also denied that the subpoenas had anything to do with pressuring Powell on interest rates. “What should pressure him is the fact that rates are far too high,” Trump said. “That’s the only pressure he’s got.” But Trump’s own words leading up to the subpoenas appear to contradict his denials. In fact, it was as recently as December 29 when Trump publicly suggested that he may pursue legal action against Powell about the Federal Reserve building renovations.   “It’s going to end up causing more than $4 billion—$4 billion!” Trump said in a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, insisting it was the “highest price of construction per square foot in the history of the world.”  “He’s just a very incompetent man, but we’re going to probably bring a lawsuit against him,” Trump added. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, told Politico that “the independence of the Federal Reserve is paramount and I oppose any effort to pressure them into action.” The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Powell’s statement or criticism from Republican lawmakers. The dollar has since dropped, with the price of gold jumping to a record price after news of the DOJ’s investigation broke. Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve go well beyond Powell. In August, the president attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the board, based on unproven allegations of mortgage fraud, as part of the same campaign to pressure the Fed into lowering rates. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked Trump’s move, and it is scheduled to hear arguments next week. The case will decide whether the president has the power to fire a board member of the Federal Reserve for any reason. 

Not long ago, plagiarist-turned-MAGA-influencer Benny Johnson stood in a parking garage underneath Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem emerged; the two embraced, then loaded into SUVs to drive outside the city to ICE’s Broadview detainment facility. Johnson filmed the road in front of him for a video, which he posted to his 6 million subscriber YouTube channel, snapping his fingers in excitement. Upon arriving, demonstrators—whom Johnson referred to as “left-wing orcs”—were being watched by armed, masked agents who looked, he said admiringly, “ready to conquer Baghdad.” > Johnson seamlessly blends fawning Trump coverage, PR, rage-bait, and > apologism. When the video cut to a group of handcuffed protesters, looking glum, Johnson beamed: “These are exactly the kind of people we want to be pissing off.”  Johnson trailed Noem through the building as she spoke to underlings at their desks, “raising the esprit de corps,” he declared. Throughout his tour, Johnson repeatedly claimed that the facility had been “attacked” so many times that it had been necessary to install a “sniper’s nest.” A rooftop shot shows Noem, her mouth stretched into a deep frown, gazing at a turret-mounted gun aimed at the street. “These are very dangerous times,” Johnson added. “What’s going on homie?” Johnson asked, turning to an ICE agent in a black balaclava and orange sunglasses, his face completely hidden. He shook the officer’s hand vigorously. “We’re here to support you guys.”  Johnson’s role that early October day was somewhere between adoring observer and fringe participant, as captured in a video in his typical style: reasonably professionally produced, with the jumpy, fast-talking, quick cuts beloved by influencers; studiously provocative; and slavishly devoted to the Trump administration.  In the journalism world, Johnson is best known for leaving two publications in disgrace after his plagiarism was discovered, and for taking—inadvertently, he has said—money from a Kremlin-backed media organization, and for being a hard partier, a difficult boss and colleague, and an almost surreally dedicated self-promoter. (“I met him once at a party,” says a colleague of mine. “His whole vibe is so weird that I thought at first he might be fucking with me.”)  Now, he’s something like the administration’s propagandist and content creator in chief, with his work seamlessly blending fawning coverage, PR, rage-bait, and apologism. While ostensibly an independent vlogger and podcaster, Johnson’s role is premised on access to—and lavish posts about—both administration initiatives like Noem’s raids or touring Alligator Alcatraz with the president, and more social engagements, like watching UFC fights ringside with Trump, smoking cigars at the vice presidential residence, and a Christmastime tour of the White House with his family. All of this more or less lives up to Johnson’s social media tagline: “Your front seat to the golden era.” Reporters and others who have watched Johnson’s evolution aren’t exactly surprised by where he’s ended up, describing him as “a charismatic motherfucker,” as one former colleague put it, a political and social chameleon, and someone whose work seems untethered by normal moral and ethical considerations.  “It’s ended at the place where it was inevitable that he would end,” says one person who socialized with him in DC about a decade ago.  His politics then were “sort of a libertarian inflected conservatism,” another person who knew him at the time says, “skeptical of power and government. And it’s absurd to look at him now.”   “The thing you need to know about Benny is he’s a chameleon,” says a former colleague from BuzzFeed News. “Drop him into any environment and he’ll reflect that environment because he wants to be liked.” Johnson’s particular notoriety is a useful key to understanding a core value of the Trump administration: shamelessness. The president’s circle is full of people with notable—and, in many cases, ongoing—public scandals. For Johnson, like so many others, not running from their past is a feature, not a bug. “One of the great virtues to have is that you got caught doing bad things and not giving a fuck,” says John Stanton, a former DC bureau chief at BuzzFeed News, who was involved in the outlet’s 2014 decision to fire Johnson. “That’s the definition of Donald Trump’s career. He’s been caught over and over again. I think they value that greatly.”  > “His whole vibe is so weird that I thought at first he might be fucking with > me.” Another thing Trump values is intense toadying, and Johnson today has no qualms about being in open alignment with power. He depicts himself as part of a battle for the future of America, one with Trump fearlessly at the helm and his fellow pro-Trump media members manning the guns. Their targets are Democrats, the mainstream media, LGBTQ visibility, political correctness, immigration, and any other object of hate the president might identify on any given week. “True freedom is a functional, peaceful, orderly society where you can get a piece of the American Dream,” Johnson tweeted recently. “We must protect and fight for it at all costs. This is our generational battle. This is our Normandy and Iwo Jima. The enemy is already inside the gates.” The results are making themselves felt. Johnson has cast himself as an heir to the throne of his former boss, slain Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk. Johnson’s wife, Katelyn Rieley Johnson, has bragged that he got Jimmy Kimmel pulled off the air after the late-night host discussed Kirk’s death. In a podcast within a week of the shooting, Johnson, who has said he was a close friend of Kirk’s, seemed to get FCC Chair Brendan Carr to endorse a claim that Kimmel’s monologue had been a “clear cut violation” of policy against “news distortion.”  “Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr told Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” ABC’s suspension soon followed. Johnson is pushing the boundaries of even what the Trump wing of the Republican Party is willing to say. He’s launched an attack on H-1B visas, those granted to skilled workers in specialty occupations, and called for a halt to legal immigration too. He’s also one of the far-right voices amplifying unproven claims that welfare fraud among Somali immigrants in Minnesota has funded the terrorist group al-Shabaab.  “Your tax dollars are being stolen and shipped over to people who hate us and want us dead,” Johnson tweeted. “You should be furious. This is a direct result of careless immigration policies. We must ramp up mass deportations and halt all legal immigration.”  More and more overtly, Johnson is depicting nonwhite immigrants as an existential cultural threat, an increasingly stark and baldly racist us-or-them approach. And he’s using the tips and tricks of virality and traffic-mongering he learned at places like BuzzFeed to do it. Johnson, 38, is trim and nondescript, with sandy brown hair, black-rimmed glasses, and an absolutely immobile forehead. His speaking style is usually bland, a mildly incredulous cadence and lowered volume that can be reminiscent of Tucker Carlson under light sedation. In what seems like an effort to sound younger, he sometimes greets his viewers with “yo,” or proclaims things to be “wild.”  Johnson’s company, Benny Media, produces an extraordinary amount of content: His YouTube channel churns out one to four videos a day. His five-day-a-week podcast, The Benny Show, interviews members of Congress, Cabinet members, various Trumps, and conspiracy peddlers back to back, an unbroken stream of boosterism and suspicion. Johnson tweets relentlessly (4 million followers) and posts versions of his YouTube content to Instagram (2 million followers) and TikTok (just over 325,000). The effect is a wall of content, a one-man Fox News.  Johnson’s value to the administration is rooted in his sycophancy; he reliably depicts them in the heroic, tough, battle-ready light they want to be seen. This has led to unintended consequences: In November, a 233-page opinion from Sara Ellis, a Chicago-based federal judge, cited Johnson’s videos eight times while demonstrating that Noem and Greg Bovino, the senior US Border Patrol official who’s become the face of Trump’s anti-migrant crackdown, illegally encouraged force against demonstrators.  “For example,” Ellis wrote, Johnson’s footage captured Noem as she “admonished agents at Broadview to go hard against people for ‘the way that they’re talking, speaking, who they’re affiliated with, who they’re funded with, and what they’re talking about…,’ statements that Bovino then echoed.” Ellis dryly noted that Noem stood for an interview with Johnson with a group of “arrestees as a backdrop,” people who were later released without charges. In a tweet, Johnson dubbed these people, falsely, “Democrat domestic terrorists.” > Johnson puts out videos that appeal to both racist and conspiratorial viewers. Johnson also puts out videos that would appeal to both racist and more overtly conspiratorial viewers: a video mocking Black EBT recipients upset about losing SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, for instance, or one that expressed support for the baseless theory promoted by Candace Owens that France’s first lady, Brigitte Macron, was born male. (The Macrons have sued Owens and others who spread the claim.) Johnson has amplified a similar false story about Michelle Obama, and also is not above making his own pure, grotesque outrage bait: After his visit to Chicago, he posted an AI-generated video of himself in a Batman suit, punching people in sombreros and an Asian woman. (Johnson later deleted the tweet.)   “He’s always on,” says Keith Edwards, a left-leaning YouTuber who has tracked Johnson’s rise. “It’s a superpower. It’s probably a bit of dysfunction as well.”  “He’s able to say and do things that I think are just kind of beyond the pale,” Edwards adds. “Going on ICE raids, saying things that are clearly not true…It’s a level of relationship with the truth that I just think is abysmal. He doesn’t really have one.” The Trump administration and its allies have backed and promoted Johnson to new heights, and his enemies are also now the enemies of the state. In October, Attorney General Pam Bondi stood aside Johnson and helped announce charges against a 69-year-old San Diego man who allegedly sent him a letter expressing a wish that someone would murder him like Kirk. Bondi cast Johnson as an heir to Kirk’s legacy: “Benny is a well-known media personality carrying a message very similar to Charlie’s, grounded largely in faith and love of country.” Ever on-message, he explicitly blamed the threat against him on the Democratic Party. “This is what happens when a party abandons faith and morality,” Johnson tweeted that day. “It is the same Godless hatred that threatened my family, murdered Charlie, attacked churches and ICE agents, and tried to assassinate President Trump.”  The White House gave Johnson a place of honor at an August press conference—the briefing room’s daily “new media” seat—from which he falsely claimed his onetime home in Washington, DC, had been set on fire in 2020, seeming to suggest it was a targeted attack. According to the New York Times, Johnson also claimed in a subsequent YouTube video that his house “was burned to the ground.” While there was an “intentionally set” fire on his block, according to DC’s fire department, firefighters contained the “blaze to [the] home of origin,” which was actually his neighbor’s. Johnson sold the supposedly destroyed house in 2021. At the press conference, Johnson also falsely claimed his security camera had captured murders on his block, when none had been recently reported. (There had been a nearby shooting the day before the fire, which left three people with non-life-threatening injuries. A suspect with a long history of drug-related crimes was later arrested for the shooting; his lawyer declined to comment.) Today, Johnson, his wife, and their four young children are based in Tampa. In a Newsmax appearance, he described moving to Florida as a personal escape from the “communist” leadership and lawlessness of East Coast cities. Johnson fired back at the Times story on Twitter/X, sharing security footage of smoke emanating from a window of his old house and his wife fleeing, their baby in her arms. Johnson called the paper’s reporting “dehumanizing propaganda” and proof of the “Left’s goal…to never grant sympathy to regular Americans, even if they’re innocent children. Evil bastards.”  Alas, Johnson has complained that trouble followed him to Tampa. This month, he tweeted that a man showed up at his door “ranting about me” before going to the house of another Florida-based conservative figure, Phillip Buchanan, who goes by Catturd online. According to federal court records, the man, identified as Andrew Aiyar, has been charged with posting a threatening tweet saying he intended to kill the wife of another conservative podcaster, Matt Walsh, “with a meat cleaver.”  “I don’t like to speak publicly about this kind of stuff because it involves my family and their security. I’m sick over it,” Johnson wrote. “But I have an obligation to amplify this case as it is one of multiple ongoing criminal prosecutions for threats against my family. Over the past year I’ve watched my President get shot in the head and my friend get assassinated. Things are spiraling wildly out of control. There are real-world consequences for psychotic rhetoric and lies amplified online. Enough.” Aiyar’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. It wasn’t all that long ago that Johnson was throwing back shots with the same mainstream media he now denounces as evil. Unlike many figures in Trump’s media ecosystem, Johnson’s early career included work at news outlets with track records of real reporting. After beginning as a blogger for The Federalist, in 2012 Johnson, then writing for The Blaze, started courting Ben Smith, BuzzFeed News’ founding editor-in-chief. As a form of flattery, Johnson told Smith during a conversation on the floor of that year’s Republican National Convention that he was, according to Smith’s 2024 memoir Traffic, “religiously copying our work” for The Blaze.  > Johnson was active in a hard partying, ideologically diverse, and sexually > libertine DC scene. As Smith writes, he was looking to hire a right-leaning writer who would allow fellow conservatives to “see themselves in BuzzFeed.”  “Benny represented, to me, an untapped new well of traffic,” Smith wrote, “a new identity to plumb.” Smith, now the editor-in-chief of Semafor, writes that he allowed his eyes to “skate over” what he describes as Johnson’s “race-baiting” posts on the New Black Panther Party, an obscure group that Johnson implied had influence over President Obama. “I certainly didn’t run his work through,” Smith admits, “plagiarism-detection software.” At first, Johnson’s presence at BuzzFeed was a hit. “He was one of the reporters who consistently drove a lot of traffic at a time when that really mattered,” a former DC friend says. “He’d do these buzzy stories,” they added, that didn’t necessarily push any ideology. A particularly popular one from 2013 focused on the “running of the interns,” a Supreme Court coverage ritual where young broadcast news workers sprint freshly issued opinions to on-camera reporters waiting outside the building, vying to be first. The listicle was heavy on photos, light on text, and undeniably charming.  At the time, Johnson was omnipresent on the DC circuit, knocking down drinks with an ideologically diverse group of journalists and political operatives, united in their mission of trying to get into the most exclusive parties. (When only a few people showed up to his 2013 birthday, he was devastated, one person remembers.) The scene was hard partying and sexually libertine, another person from those circles recalls, even among the more politically conservative figures. “There was a lot of sex happening,” they said, including right-leaning people who were somewhat openly bisexual. “A psychoanalyst would have a field day.”  Even then, though, Johnson didn’t let his guard down much, even with people he spent a lot of time drinking with. “He wasn’t a person that it felt possible to get close to,” one journalist who knew him then says.  Johnson was productive, racking up more than 500 stories in a year and a half at BuzzFeed News, earning the title of Viral Politics editor. There was, however, trouble in paradise: “Benny was always the target of progressives on Twitter,” Smith wrote in his book, “who saw him as a dangerous protofascist.” In July 2014, after Johnson accused the Independent Journal Review, a recently formed conservative site, of plagiarizing his work on former President George H.W. Bush’s socks, two pseudonymous Twitter users built a case that Johnson had himself been recycling text from Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. After their findings were picked up by Gawker’s J.K. Trotter, Smith initially defended him as “one of the web’s deeply original writers.” But BuzzFeed began investigating Johnson’s work and realized that at least 15 stories had been plagiarized, including some that relied on content published by other news outlets. As Stanton recalls, “that’s when it was like, ‘We’re gonna fire him.’” The number of plagiarized stories BuzzFeed uncovered ultimately reached 41.  BuzzFeed suspended Johnson while the investigation took place. “Unbeknownst to us he went to the beach with his girlfriend,” Stanton says, “and turned off his phone.” To deliver the news of his firing, Stanton resorted to calling his girlfriend. When she handed the phone to Johnson, Stanton recalls, he said his detractors were “jealous, and after him, and people didn’t like him because he was conservative.” Then Johnson said “YOLO” and hung up.   “Put aside the moral implications or reasoning that he has for being who he is, he was clearly attempting to make a name for himself and become famous, and he took a bunch of shortcuts to do that knowing that could have bad blowback on his colleagues—and it did. People questioned their reporting,” Stanton, now editor of New Orleans’ altweekly Gambit, says. “He never apologized to his co-workers for putting them in this tough spot.”  “He’s quite talented. He could’ve done good stuff,” says another one of his BuzzFeed editors. “But he was too lazy to do the work.” Johnson was silent on social media for about a month before announcing that he’d taken a social media editor job at the National Review—one of the places he’d plagiarized from. The ironies compounded, when, within a year, he joined the Independent Journal Review as “content director.” In 2015, Ben Terris described the move in a Washington Post profile as a triumphant comeback, noting that Johnson had escaped what’s usually a journalism career death sentence. “Benny rebounded unusually quickly” after BuzzFeed, Terris wrote, “fielding offers within weeks of his dismissal from media organizations eager to get a piece of the addictive new breed of storytelling perfected by this 29-year-old.” But by the following year, Johnson had precipitated what media reporter Oliver Darcy, then writing for Business Insider, called “a crisis” at IJR after being accused of plagiarism, again, by his colleagues; he also faced charges that he was mercurial, dictatorial, and verbally abusive to people working under him.  > “I hadn’t been screamed at like that since I was probably seven years old on > the playground.” “Johnson—who once compared himself to Walt Disney, two people said—frequently berated the video team over what was characterized as minuscule details,” Darcy wrote. “Multiple sources said Johnson loudly hurled profanity at team members for small mistakes, fostering a distressing work environment. The behavior eventually led to Johnson receiving a formal verbal reprimand from the company’s human-resources department.”  Johnson was demoted after the Business Insider story, and, by 2017, had left IJR too, following his role in a story that baselessly claimed former President Obama was somehow behind a court ruling blocking Trump’s first-term anti-Muslim travel ban. By 2019, he made a clean break from news outlets by signing as chief creative officer at Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and, around 2020, co-founded Arsenal Media, a PR firm to help conservative politicians and media figures go viral. That job also produced bad press, when an investigation from The Verge again depicted him as “bullying and humiliating” staffers.  Johnson could be “very abusive, very toxic, screaming at people, like using profanity, vulgarity, making women cry, like pushing them to the edge,” one anonymous worker told The Verge, elaborating that they “hadn’t been screamed at like that since I was probably seven years old on the playground.”  While Arsenal Media still exists, Johnson is no longer part of it or Turning Point USA, relying instead on his own eponymous media company to make money. At least one major source of Johnson’s funding, however, has dried up. In September 2024, two Russian nationals were indicted for allegedly bankrolling Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based company that, as part of a plot to stoke domestic division, funneled nearly $10 million to conservative influencers, including Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern. The Justice Department said the content creators who had ended up as part of the foreign influence operation hadn’t been told of the company’s Russian funding, and Tenet Media’s talent said they were unaware of the true source of their hefty paychecks. In a statement at the time, Johnson said he and the “other influencers were victims in this alleged scheme. My lawyers will handle anyone who states or suggests otherwise.”  These days, Johnson has fashioned an identity as a conservative dad and devoted husband, a model of traditional values. (“Benny is a man of simple tastes,” his website bio reads, one who “enjoys sitting down with a glass of whiskey and a pipe, preferably after a meal featuring as much meat as he can fit on the grill.”) For the last few years, his wife has made her own efforts to become a social media personality, using her previous career as a registered nurse to rebrand as “Nurse Kate,” “a health and wellness advocate” who also promotes vaccine suspicion and what she’s called a “trad wife” lifestyle; she recently appeared on Fox News to call for an end to infighting in the MAGA movement.  Johnson has become more overtly anti-LGBTQ over time, complaining in a June YouTube video about Pride Month “shoving rainbow-colored vomit down your throat,” as he put it. This has raised eyebrows, given that a former BuzzFeed colleague of Johnson’s, the author Saeed Jones, has posted online that the two men once “made out” at a booze-soaked 2013 company Christmas party. (Jones did not respond to requests for comment.) “I’m not naming names,” Jones added, but “I wasn’t even the only guy Benny made out with THAT night.”  > “I personally believe Benny Johnson should get as much conservative dick as he > wants, and I’m happy for him.” At least two gay men in progressive media have commented on this apparent hypocrisy. In September, Keith Edwards made a video, which has amassed more than 600,000 views, rounding up evidence of Johnson’s bisexuality or homosexuality. In addition to Jones’ tweets, it includes allegations from far-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos and a 2017 incident where Johnson complained about an ad on Military Times’ site promoting a gay cruise, seeming not to realize it was likely targeted based on his own web browsing history.  “I’m allergic to hypocrisy,” Edwards says. “I personally believe Benny Johnson should get as much conservative dick as he wants, and I’m happy for him. But you have to be truthful about who you are. Otherwise you’re damaging people like you who don’t have the ability to hide.” Progressive talk radio host Michelangelo Signorile, who’s written a book arguing for outing closeted political figures, responded to Edwards’ video on his blog, writing that “if this is true, it’s certainly relevant for the media to confirm it and report on it, as Johnson is part of a movement doing enormous damage to the LGBTQ community and is a powerful player who helped elect a president who is promoting vile hatred against queer people.”  Rumors about Johnson’s sexuality have also become ammunition in a fractious battle, as the MAGA movement has been convulsed by a power struggle kicked off by Kirk’s death, the lack of a clear successor to Trump, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s emerging apostasy. In December, Johnson and his wife appeared to threaten to sue Yiannopoulos—a self-proclaimed “ex-gay” man—for repeatedly tweeting that Johnson is closeted. In return, Yiannopoulos tweeted that “I have receipts, and the truth is a total defense against any claim of defamation or libel.”  For anyone who might wonder about the gap between the stories they’ve heard about Johnson and the image he now presents, Johnson has credited Charlie Kirk with helping personally set him on the straight and narrow.  “I was unmarried,” Johnson said during an October speech at a Moms for Liberty summit that he posted to TikTok. “I was a degenerate. I was every bit addicted to alcohol and some very bad things. And through Charlie’s example in my life, he Christ-centered me.” As Johnson continues his Trump-and-Kirk-and-Christ-aided comeback, some observers have questioned the authenticity of his social media followings. Progressive YouTuber David Pakman, for instance, accused him in August of using “artificial inflation strategies” to boost his subscriber count far beyond what his videos’ viewership would suggest. (A YouTube spokesperson told the Times it “did not find any evidence of inauthentic traffic, including inauthentic channel subscriptions.”)  But what can be discerned about Johnson’s audience from the comments they leave on his videos is that they skew older—baby boomers who found their way online and eventually into the deeper end of the conspiracy pool. His content is still packaged, more or less, as news, and it is accessible on platforms that they can find; he focuses heavily on issues those viewers care about, like alleged voter fraud and the perceived unfairness of previous prosecutions against Donald Trump. One of the few times Johnson ever showed signs of going off-message was during the first round of controversy over the Trump administration’s failure to release the Epstein files in full, even as he repeatedly insisted that Trump was not in the files himself. But at the same time he suggested he was unsatisfied by the administration’s lacking disclosure, Johnson was running cover, assuring his audience on July 14, for instance, that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—who’d threatened to quit over a feud with Bondi over releasing the files—was working hard on something “very important.”  “Trump Team is ‘back together and locking in,’” Johnson wrote, putting his words in quotes without making it clear whose words he was quoting.  But Johnson has mostly worked to echo the administration’s evolving line on the files. When Trump, under growing public pressure, ginned up a new Epstein investigation targeting prominent Democrats and said the House GOP should back a bill demanding their release, Johnson was on-message, writing that “every shred of evidence points directly at Democrats.”  > “He has a ten or 15 year career to make a lot of money, and then you’ll watch > him get crazy.” He’s been rewarded for that loyalty, again, by both the Trump administration and the larger MAGA sphere. Johnson, whose podcast is sponsored by an online home mortgage lender, recently announced that he’ll be partnering with a conservative property developer as a spokesperson for “Make Housing Great Again.” (The Trump-linked America First Policy Institute, sponsor of the initiative, did not respond to a request for comment on whether he will be paid. Johnson also did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this story.) In Johnson’s words, the “fight for homeownership” is a “fight for the survival of our culture and civilization.”  “The average first-time homebuyer in America is now 40-years-old. That is far beyond the optimal age to get married and start a family,” Johnson told Fox News. “This is a generational betrayal, and we must reverse it for our children and for their future. This was the final policy priority of Charlie Kirk. We will deliver and save the American Dream.”   Many people who know Johnson ponder his longevity should the Republican party ever move on from Trump.  “Some of these influencers in DC are getting so close to the administration it’s backfiring on their brands,” a person familiar with conservative media told me while discussing Johnson.  “He has a ten or 15 year career to make a lot of money and then you’ll watch him get crazy,” someone who knew him in conservative media predicts. “At a certain point that becomes useless to people in serious political circles. Assuming that the Trump thing is a blip in history, I don’t see the classic Marco Rubio type using Benny for distribution. The candle burns bright and then it burns out.”  “I don’t know that anybody will have any kind of good reason to be nice to Benny if and when the worm turns and all the authoritarians are out of favor,” agrees Stanton, the former BuzzFeed editor. “I don’t think he’s got that kind of shelf life. But I’m not sure that matters anymore.” 

Here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we excel at finding things: government documents, contact information, the misdeeds people have tried to hide. It’s serious work that we use for serious tasks—but that gave us an idea. What would happen if we used these skills for things that are less about accountability and more about joy? If we turned our energy toward meaningful, personal questions?  That was the spark for our first-ever hour examining our favorite inconsequential investigations. We turned our tried and true journalistic strategies on our own biggest questions to see where the trail led. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This week, we take up Mother Jones video reporter Garrison Hayes’ quest to find the first short film he ever made, even though it was lost to the early 2000s internet. Yowei Shaw of the podcast Proxy brings us along as she meets her doppelganger and discovers the truth behind how people see her. And Reveal producer Ashley Cleek untangles her own biggest unsolved mystery: Did reclusive rock star Jeff Mangum really call into her college radio show, asking her for a favor?  We plan to do more “inconsequential investigations” like this. So, if you have a personal mystery that needs looking into, please email Inconsequential@revealnews.org. Listen in the player above, and check out our guide to finding lost Google Videos.

By the spring of 2022, Ed Aldag was fed up. The 61-year-old CEO of a multibillion-dollar real estate company called Medical Properties Trust, Aldag is a high-society fixture in the company’s hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, where MPT has donated millions to local nonprofits and where he’s regularly listed as one of the city’s most influential businessmen. But for years, Aldag had watched as MPT faced tough questions from the federal government, investors, and, most recently, a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal.  MPT makes money by acting as a landlord: It buys hospitals and then rents the facilities back to providers. Over the previous year, the Journal had published several stories that focused on the company’s finances, including reporting that dug into MPT’s biggest tenant—Steward Health Care, then one of the largest for-profit hospital operators in the nation—and the unusually close financial relationship between the two companies. The Journal’s pieces raised concerns about whether Steward was struggling—and whether MPT was engaging in secret transactions to keep it afloat. Mother Jones and others would later report how Steward’s financial mismanagement harmed hundreds of people: We found 83 deaths across its 39 hospitals, hundreds of malpractice lawsuits, and more than 700 patient care problems documented in federal hospital inspections. The Journal, meanwhile, was the first to notice this mismanagement at work, revealing that Steward hospitals owed nearly $1 billion to medical supply companies and other vendors. > In one tense email exchange in March 2022, Aldag wrote to a PR firm, “We > cannot let a deranged pretend journalist tell a false story of MPT.”  That reporting was the beginning of years of intense scrutiny of MPT in the world of finance that hurt the company’s stock price and eventually led, earlier this month, to a trio of Democratic US senators proposing the “Stop Medical Profiteering and Theft (MPT) Act” to impose limits on the company’s business. But it was also the apparent start of an aggressive, previously unreported campaign by Steward, MPT, and other still-unknown actors to silence their critics. Internal documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and shared with Mother Jones show that MPT amassed an army of crisis management professionals to protect its reputation, eventually working alongside three different crisis public relations firms, five law firms, and two private intelligence firms. The documents, along with information from sources close to this effort, show a major effort to control the narrative: In one tense email exchange in March 2022, Aldag wrote to a PR firm, “We cannot let a deranged pretend journalist tell a false story of MPT.”  As part of a social media push that used anonymous accounts to discredit and intimidate the growing chorus of journalists, investment analysts, and short sellers who questioned the company, an intelligence firm baited MPT’s detractors online. And while the Boston Globe and OCCRP reported last year that Steward paid the British firm Audere International to surveil one particularly provocative MPT critic, new documents show a much broader tracking campaign, funded in part by Steward and other shadowy actors but focused on MPT, targeting a half dozen of the company’s skeptics. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. “They were always looking for something explosive that would make things go away,” a source close to Audere wrote in messages reviewed by Mother Jones that were confirmed with the source directly. “Although Steward was the customer, it was clear that MPT was what Audere was protecting.”  An MPT spokesperson did not respond to a detailed list of questions but made clear in an emailed statement that the company disagrees with the many critics questioning its business practices. The company, the spokesperson said, “has unfailingly disclosed each of its transactions as and when required under applicable securities laws.” The spokesperson also said that as criticism of MPT has mounted, its executives and their families have been harassed, including receiving death threats: “As any responsible company in that position would do, we have periodically engaged advisors to help navigate this situation.” The spokesperson added: “It is critical to note that MPT has never directly or indirectly engaged with detractors on social media, nor have we paid any third-party to do so.”  The company’s damage control started in earnest with the lead reporter behind the Journal’s stories, Brian Spegele. His reporting on MPT began in 2021, when a number of its tenant hospitals across the country—a Steward hospital in Pennsylvania, and ones owned by other for-profit operators in Wyoming and Rhode Island—all seemed to be running into financial issues. While these facilities struggled, MPT was hitting its highest stock price ever.   > MPT leaders asked their PR firm to suss out the angle of Spegele’s upcoming > article and questioned whether the Journal was working to short their stock. Spegele emailed MPT with questions about how it was running its business—and how it might be affecting hospitals. He’d heard from insiders that MPT was overpaying for hospitals because higher sale values meant they could charge higher rents. Did the company want to comment? Why had one of their hospitals in Ohio shut down not long after it started renting from MPT? Did the company really have three corporate jets?  In dozens of leaked emails, Aldag strategized with other leaders over how to respond. They brought in the crisis PR firm Joele Frank to help, as well as a law firm that specializes in filing defamation cases against journalists, Clare Locke. They asked their PR firm to speak with Spegele and suss out the angle of his upcoming article and questioned whether the Journal was working to short their stock. Was the paper hinting to investors that MPT was going to fail?     In December 2021, Clare Locke sent a letter to the Journal’s legal team and top editors, threatening to sue the paper before Spegele had even published his next story and demanding that he reveal his sources. The following month, MPT’s stock hit a new high: about $24 per share. Not long after, the paper’s lawyer sent an email to Clare Locke, noting that Spegele had experienced “some security concerns,” and he wanted to discuss them on the phone. (Spegele declined to comment; a Wall Street Journal spokesperson did not answer specific questions but noted, “The safety and security of our reporters is of paramount importance. While we won’t discuss the details of the protective measures we take, we stand by the Journal’s in-depth and consequential reporting on Medical Properties Trust.” Clare Locke and Joele Frank also did not respond to questions.)  The Journal published Spegele’s piece in February 2022. It claimed that MPT was quietly infusing hundreds of millions into Steward through complex loans and other means, enabling its hospitals to continue to pay rent. This meant that MPT’s largest tenant was actually struggling, which boded poorly for MPT, as well. Yet the article also pointed out executives’ excessive spending on things like Aldag’s multimillion-dollar salary and the regular use of the company’s private jets. Investors started emailing and calling MPT, and its stock price began to slide.  > “We already know what he is going to say and I refuse to let him tell the > story…” Aldag wrote. “We need to devise a plan to be proactive in our > storytelling.” Spegele soon started working on another story, about an MPT-owned hospital in California. His continued requests for comment angered Aldag.  “I’m tired of this guy,” Aldag wrote, adding that the former employees Spegele had cited anonymously were “absolutely fake.” Then he called his team to action: “We already know what he is going to say and I refuse to let him tell the story…We need to devise a plan to be proactive in our storytelling outside of the WSJ.” He told his PR advisers that if this wasn’t a project they could take on, he imagined they could find other companies to help.  “Ladies,” he wrote, “it’s time we go on the offensive.” Investment analyst Rob Simone thought there was something to the Journal’s stories. He worked at a research firm called Hedgeye, and soon he started digging into whatever public information he could find about MPT.  He was struck by the fact that MPT seemed to be at the root of Steward’s financial issues—and its hospitals’ increasing problems paying their bills. According to our own analysis, by 2022, at least four health care companies that had lease agreements with MPT had gone bankrupt, shutting down hospitals or throwing them into uncertainty. Simone told Hedgeye’s paid subscribers in April 2022 that MPT was sinking hospitals instead of helping them, by saddling their operations with leases they couldn’t afford. He claimed that beneath its veneer of success, Steward “appears to be insolvent” and that its dwindling finances likely meant future trouble for MPT, which he suggested was quietly infusing money into Steward to help it pay rent. And he wondered about the compensation that MPT’s board of directors (which includes Aldag and the company’s CFO) had green-lit for executives, while Steward and some of their other tenants were financially struggling. He recommended shorting the stock. “I just started doing work on this and became fascinated and thought it was a real problem—and that problem kept getting worse, and so I kept writing about it,” Simone told us when we spoke last year. “It never, never, ever improved.” MPT leadership pilloried Simone’s research on the company’s next earnings call. But Simone’s reports about MPT continued to gain traction on Twitter and investing websites, especially as the company’s stock price started to dip, from around $20 to $15 in the summer of 2022.  > But as more investors began to short MPT and drag down its stock price, > Audere’s work increasingly focused on those critical of the publicly traded > landlord. And Simone wasn’t alone. A writer who called himself @BigRiverCapita1 was making similar claims on social media and Wall Street blogs. The account was anonymous but clearly well versed in finance, pointing out past bankruptcies of MPT’s tenants and questioning whether these hospitals were struggling, shutting down, or cutting back patient care due to their pricey leases with MPT.  Around then is when Audere, the British private intelligence firm, got involved. According to OCCRP and the Boston Globe, Steward had already been paying to surveil its critics for a few years—eventually spending more than $7 million on these operations. But as Big River’s posts and Simone’s research spread, and more investors began to short MPT and drag down its stock price, Audere’s work increasingly focused on those critical of the publicly traded landlord, even as its tenant Steward remained Audere’s client, according to leaked documents and sources close to Audere. (An Audere spokesperson told Mother Jones that the company cannot answer questions about its confidential work, but that Audere “takes its legal and regulatory compliance obligations seriously and acts in accordance with the same.”) In June 2022, Audere hired a contractor to start looking into these critics, leaked emails show. They named the operation “Project Morden.” They told the contractor they had two main goals: Dig into why Rob Simone was writing about MPW (they referred to MPT by its stock ticker symbol), and identify the person behind @BigRiverCapita1: Leaked email regarding Project Morden A strategy memo noted that “multiple financial professionals believe that RS [Rob Simone] does not have the capacity to drive MPW downward.” Still, the firm demanded an aggressive approach to Big River and Simone, whom they deemed Target 1 and Target 2. “Uncover the subjects (sic) vulnerabilities and pressure points,” the memo urged, suggesting the contractor unearth details about “career, integrity, personal life and identify any potential misconduct.”  > Anonymous Twitter accounts started to follow and harass Simone, asking if he > had security and even tweeting, “his life [was] in danger.” And that, Simone said, is when the trouble started.  Anonymous Twitter accounts started to follow and harass him, asking if he had security and even tweeting that “his life [was] in danger.” Simone’s company, Hedgeye, grew concerned about this safety and provided him with enhanced security, but neither they nor Simone ever figured out who was behind the accounts. One tweet even warned that if he didn’t stop reporting and tweeting about MPT, “he could end up like Daphne,” an allusion to the murder of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed after reporting on a Steward hospital deal in Malta in 2017.  MPT’s leaders also began to meticulously track their detractors. By October 2022, they were keeping tabs on all the skeptics dialing in to their public earnings calls and even discussed not taking their questions: “Please make us a list of all the bad actors that listened in,” Aldag wrote to top executives in an email. They sent back a lengthy list that included nearly 20 professional financial analysts, including Simone. Related WALL STREET GUTTED STEWARD HEALTH CARE. PATIENTS PAID THE PRICE. The following month, MPT received Audere’s intelligence reports over email. And soon, Audere further ramped up its campaign against Simone, even hiring a contractor to create a fake blog written from the perspective of a woman trying to hold investment analysts to account. But its true goal was to criticize just one player: Hedgeye. It was called “Hedge Spy.” (After Mother Jones and Reveal mentioned this contractor’s work in previous reporting, the blog was taken down from the internet.) Initially the blog was populated with stories that cast doubt on a variety of firms, as the contract writer explained to Audere in emails reviewed by Mother Jones. “The more general content will disguise the blog’s objective,” wrote the contractor. The contractor also launched a Reddit account, Loud-Peanut-7716, whose goal was “to actively engage in discussions and facilitate the conversations concerning Hedgeye.” In an email to Audere, the contractor listed some of the Reddit posts trying to discredit Simone’s firm: “Can you recommend any research platforms? I tried Hedgeye but I don’t trust them after their recent dirty tricks stalking and intimidating their competitors” “They don’t care about making us rich, they want to make THEMSELVES rich! DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!” At the start of 2023, a new critic took on MPT, publishing a series of reports with cheeky titles and provocative tweets that alleged MPT was committing a brazen financial fraud. That voice was a British investor named Fraser Perring. Perring runs a short-selling firm called Viceroy Research that makes big financial bets on companies it thinks will fail, digging deep into their financials to see if they might be hiding something. He has tens of thousands of followers on social media, where he often posts his findings and claims of corporate wrongdoing. > Management soon would help fuel a conspiracy theory that was already growing > at MPT: that their critics were working together to short their stock. In January of that year, Viceroy published the first of what would be several reports on MPT. Titled “Medical Properties (dis)Trust,” the report arrived at many of the same conclusions that had been swirling around Wall Street: Steward was going belly up, and MPT seemed to be secretly funneling it money to stave off bankruptcy. And perhaps more clearly than anyone before, Viceroy accused MPT of “round-tripping”: Not only was it loaning money to help Steward pay rent, but it was then recording this rent as new earnings and not disclosing it, all to maintain the illusion that it was a healthy landlord. Viceroy’s report sent MPT executives into a tizzy. Leaked documents show the company was scrutinizing Perring’s tweets alleging round-tripping, with executives furiously sharing them with one another and one of their PR firms compiling them all. Management soon would help fuel a conspiracy theory that was already growing at MPT: that their critics—from Simone to the Wall Street Journal—were working together to short their stock and bring them down. Around that time, social media trolling of Simone and Perring ramped up. On top of that, reporting from the Boston Globe and OCCRP shows that a security firm contracted by Audere videotaped Perring at his home and watched him around his neighborhood—even following him and his daughter on their way back from school. When MPT sued Viceroy the following month for defamation, it denied all of Perring’s findings, writing that they were “malicious fiction” and had “caused serious harm to MPT.” But during litigation, according to court documents, Viceroy’s lawyers said an impostor had called Perring’s bank in the weeks leading up to MPT’s suit and pretended to be him. It’s unclear who was behind the impostor, who was able to gain access to Perring’s financial transactions; soon those details were included in a report sent to Audere. No money was stolen, but in reports to Audere the impersonator tried to figure out what Perring was spending his money on. (MPT, which agreed to settle the defamation case last December, said in a statement that it hired Audere in late 2022 for work unrelated to Perring.)  > They wondered if anyone in their “army of advisors” had an in with regulators. > Included on that email chain was exactly that kind of connection: Mick > Mulvaney. A few months later, when JP Morgan recommended that investors view the company’s stock with caution, emails show that MPT’s top executives circulated a lengthy list of analysts they believed were somehow connected to each other. They named five different investment funds and investors, and the many possible ways they were “connected”—to each other, to a Journal reporter, to Hedgeye, to Viceroy, even to liberal megadonor George Soros. And they wondered if anyone in their “army of advisors” had an in with regulators. Included on that email chain was exactly that kind of connection, someone who used to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney, who also had been President Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff, was helping to run a consulting firm called Actum. Leaked emails show that MPT brought Actum on to help it “combat” what they saw as people conspiring to target the company. To counter their criticisms, Actum drafted a white paper praising MPT, calling it a company “investing in the future of health care and communities.” (Actum did not respond to questions from Mother Jones.) Reputation management is common among publicly traded companies, notes Jo-Ellen Pozner, a professor of business at Santa Clara University who studies corporate conduct and ethics. But the scale and expense of the effort to manage MPT’s PR crises is “unequivocally not normal,” she says.  > After years of high rents to MPT, hospitals had failed to pay on-call doctors, > nurse staffing agencies, repairmen, and suppliers of everything from blood to > hospital beds. “The fact that these folks were so willing to waste company resources—spend significant amounts of money that could have been diverted to more productive uses—to investigate journalists, to investigate investment analysts, it suggests to me that they are spying, and think that everybody else is doing the same,” Pozner said.  While MPT focused on its value and reputation, patient care issues at its Steward hospitals began to reach crisis levels. Under the weight of years of high rents to MPT, these facilities had failed to pay on-call doctors, nurse staffing agencies, repairmen, and suppliers of everything from blood to hospital beds. Eventually, some Steward hospitals couldn’t afford to keep paying MPT rent and closed.  These troubles further drove MPT’s stock price down. In October 2023, when it dipped below $5, Aldag recorded a message to shareholders, telling them he remained confident in “MPT’s proven business model” for investing in and improving hospitals.  At one of them, St. Elizabeth’s in Massachusetts, a crisis had begun to unfold. The hospital owed more than $500,000 to a company that made devices used to stem internal bleeding called embolism coils; the supplier recently had come to repossess the coils.  Two weeks after Aldag posted the video reassuring shareholders, a first-time mom named Sungida Rashid delivered a baby girl at St. Elizabeth’s. Hours later, Rashid began to bleed severely, doctors discovered they didn’t have the embolism coil needed to treat her, and she died. Her family’s tragedy would set in motion articles and hearings and subpoenas trying to understand the financial dealings of MPT and Steward. It had taken years—and a mother’s life—for the story to finally come to light.  Video WATCH: INSIDE ONE OF THE LARGEST HOSPITAL SCANDALS IN US HISTORY 

A page from an Altamides sales brochure.

When New York Attorney General Letitia James accused Donald Trump of committing fraud by lying to banks and insurance companies about the value of his properties, he never really denied it. Everyone does things like this, his lawyers argued, and no bank ever lost money—so what’s the big deal? > All three Trump cabinet members denied any wrongdoing. But now that he’s in back office, Trump seems to have decided that telling banks things that aren’t true while seeking loans is a very big deal after all. His administration has launched investigations into James herself and Lisa Cook, a Biden-appointee on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, alleging both women improperly told banks that two different properties each owned were both their primary residences. He’s previously made similar accusations against one of his main Democratic antagonists in Congress, California Sen. Adam Schiff. The investigations were launched with the help of Bill Pulte, the Trump appointee leading the Federal Housing Finance Agency. On Friday, Reuters reported that relatives of Pulte appear to have done the very thing Trump and Pulte are targeting James and Cook over. Reuters says that Pulte’s father and stepmother had simultaneously requested “homestead exemptions”—a discount on property taxes for a primary residence—on two different properties, one in Michigan and one in Florida. It’s not clear if it is illegal to do so, and in some cases, tax experts told Reuters, it is permissible—for example if a married couple live separately. But after being asked about the Pultes’ situation, local tax officials promptly revoked the exemption on the Michigan house, Reuters reported. The news about Pulte’s relatives comes after a Thursday report from ProPublica revealed that three different members of Trump’s cabinet appear to have simultaneously claimed multiple properties as their primary residence. ProPublica found records showing Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin all claimed two different homes as primary residences. Chavez-DeRemer made the claims about her two homes (one in the Oregon Congressional district she previously represented, and one in Arizona, where she is known to vacation) within two months of each other. All three cabinet members denied any wrongdoing and accused ProPublica of liberal bias. According to ProPublica, it is not necessarily illegal to claim multiple homes as your primary residence at the same time—and in some cases, it may be encouraged by bank employees—but it is generally frowned upon. Banks typically offer reduced mortgage rates for primary residences, and higher rates for second homes; the practice stems from a belief that people are more likely to diligently repay the mortgage on a property if they live in it full-time.

Sungida Rashid had no intention of taking an Uber to the birth of her first child. She’d never been one to take the easy route, and besides, she wanted to get things moving—and walking seemed the best way to do it. So on an overcast Sunday in October 2023, Sungida and her husband, Nabil Haque, set out from their Boston apartment to St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the local hospital where ­Sungida, nine months pregnant, was scheduled to be induced. Sungida and Nabil had met 12 years earlier while working at a consulting firm in their native Bangladesh. Over lunches, they began strategizing about PhD applications, eventually spending years in a long-distance relationship as they fell in love and pursued their doctoral degrees in the United States. Then there was a tiny pandemic wedding, a move to Bangkok for work (she was an economics professor, he a climate researcher), a heartbreaking miscarriage, the cautious joy of another pregnancy, and finally, when Sungida was seven months along, a job opportunity for Nabil at Boston University. Sungida had waved off her husband’s suggestion that they delay his start date so she could stick with her doctors in ­Bangkok. She’d long dreamed of teaching at an American university, and the pandemic had upended several job prospects. Living in Boston would give her the chance to pursue a professorship again and, more importantly, to raise their little girl far from Bangladesh, in a country that offered greater opportunities, cleaner air, and better medical care. In their first days in Boston, Nabil set up appointments at two prospective hospitals: Brigham and Women’s, a world-­renowned nonprofit medical center, and St. Elizabeth’s, a humbler facility owned by a national for-profit hospital chain called Steward Health Care. The appointment at St. Elizabeth’s came first, and Sungida liked the midwife, so they canceled the other appointment. A few weeks later, they walked in and got ready for her induction. Her labor moved slowly, but at around 1 a.m. on October 17, Sungida gave birth to a healthy baby girl. She and Nabil named her Otindria—Bangladeshi for “extra sensory”—and snapped a smiling selfie as a new family of three, Otindria snuggled in a hospital swaddle. Nabil takes a selfie with Sungida and Otindria. Nabil Haque In the hours after, Sungida experienced some excess bleeding that doctors resolved, and soon she and Nabil moved to the recovery floor. With Otindria in her bassinet and Sungida in bed, Nabil coordinated video calls with family. He kept trying, and failing, to swaddle the baby in her ­blanket—he and Sungida laughed at how easy the nurses made it look. She reassured him they would get the hang of it. In the afternoon, Nabil made a quick trip back to their apartment. When he returned, he told Sungida he already missed his newborn daughter. “Oh, you don’t miss me now?” she joked. She was having some back pain, and nurses brought in ice packs and heating pads for relief. But as the couple settled in to watch The ­Avengers—Sungida was a huge Marvel fan—her pain worsened. After about 10 minutes, staff came in to check her vitals. Her blood pressure had dropped dangerously low. Alarms began to sound: “Code red on the recovery floor!” a voice blared over the loudspeaker. What felt to Nabil like 20 people rushed into their room. They wheeled Sungida out and took Otindria to the nursery. Nabil sat in the recovery room alone—no bed, no baby. Every so often, someone came by with an update. A CT scan showed Sungida’s abdomen had filled with blood; she needed surgery. In the OR, doctors discovered the bleed was coming from her liver. They told Nabil they would insert an embolism coil—a small device that can be placed in blood vessels to stem internal bleeding. About half an hour later, hospital staff informed Nabil they needed to transfer his wife to Boston Medical Center, 20 minutes away, because it was better equipped to do the procedure, they said. What no one told him was that St. Elizabeth’s supply of embolism coils had been repossessed by the vendor a month earlier. According to a complaint later filed with the state health department, the hospital owed more than $500,000 for these devices; the vendor claimed in a lawsuit that, nationally, Steward facilities owed it nearly $5 million. A group of St. Elizabeth’s nurses had confronted Steward management about this at a tense union meeting three weeks prior: What if a patient needed a coil? The irritated chief nursing officer responded that the hospital simply wouldn’t accept transfer patients with internal bleeding. But what if something happened in-house? The CNO didn’t answer the question. Now that exact scenario was unfolding, and staff had little choice but to transfer a woman in the midst of surgery. A nurse whisked Nabil upstairs to watch as Sungida, lying on a stretcher, her face pale, tubes up her nose, was wheeled down a hallway and out to a waiting ambulance. It would be the last time he saw her alive. St. Elizabeth’s was just a sliver of Steward’s empire. At its peak, the company boasted 41 hospitals in 10 states, medical facilities in four foreign countries, and roughly $8 billion in annual revenue. It distinguished itself to investors by promising a way to tackle a thorny problem for the industry: how to run hospitals in low-income communities while still turning a profit. Industry dominance was always the dream of Steward’s CEO, Ralph de la Torre. When he took the helm of a struggling Massachusetts-based Catholic hospital chain called Caritas Christi in 2008, de la Torre—a child of Cuban immigrants and famously ambitious cardiac surgeon—was so sure of succeeding that he let his medical license expire. Two years later, he convinced the powerful private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management to buy ­Caritas, which it renamed Steward. His timing was perfect: Private equity firms, which focus on generating a big, quick payday for their investors, had just begun ramping up their positions in health care. De la Torre hoped that teaming up with Wall Street would catapult him to national prominence, kicking off what the Boston Globe called “a royal conquest.” His reign came to an end when Steward filed for bankruptcy in May 2024, a spectacular downfall helped along by Cerberus and Medical Properties Trust (MPT), a mysterious Alabama-based real estate investment trust that became heavily involved in the company over the last decade. Steward has since been the subject of news reports and Senate hearings trying to grasp the astonishing scale of its unpaid bills—$9 billion owed to more than 100,000 creditors—and the extent to which patients suffered as executives enriched themselves. De la Torre, for instance, bought himself a $40 million yacht and an $8 million apartment in Madrid, made hundreds of trips on Steward’s private plane, and gave $10 million to his children’s elite prep school in Dallas, a donation financed partially from Steward’s coffers, according to leaked documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Cerberus made $800 million, more than tripling its investment. The CEO of MPT earned nearly $18 million last year, making him the highest-paid executive in Alabama. (De la Torre did not respond to a request for comment. Cerberus and MPT declined to answer questions from Mother Jones. In public documents, both companies have denied that their actions contributed to Steward’s financial distress.) Dadu Shin It was Sungida’s death that first connected this excess to its human costs. A January 2024 Globe story lit a fire under Massachusetts officials and regulators, who expressed outrage that profit motive had trumped patient care in a city that prides itself on world-class hospitals. Sen. Ed Markey convened a hearing that opened with a reference to Sungida, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who for years has fought to rein in Wall Street, warned that Steward was no outlier. “I will say it bluntly,” she said. “Turning private equity loose in our health care system kills people.” I’ve heard this repeatedly while writing about private equity over the last five years. One study found that private equity–owned nursing homes had a mortality rate 10 percent higher than their non-PE counterparts; another noted that patients at PE-owned hospitals are 25 percent more likely to suffer an unrelated injury while admitted, whether a fall or an infection. But such studies only provide a glimpse of the problem. As savvy executives squeeze returns out of facilities that determine whether patients live or die, there is no systematic data tracking how their acquisitions affect care. Before its downfall, Steward was among private equity’s biggest health care conquests. I wanted to know how many more Sungidas were out there. > “The reason that there are more cases with Steward is not because they have > worse doctors. It’s that they didn’t give the doctors and nurses and all the > staff the resources they need to do their job the right way.” Over the course of our yearlong investigation, Mother Jones reviewed every malpractice, personal injury, and wrongful death case filed in state and federal courts involving Steward hospitals. We found 469 lawsuits involving 83 patient deaths; many have settled or have been thwarted by Steward’s bankruptcy, while some were dismissed or resolved in the company’s favor. These numbers may understate the extent of the problem, given that the company’s hospitals served primarily low-income communities, where most patients and their families lack the resources to mount a case. We also combed through Steward’s federal inspection reports, finding 708 “deficiencies” in patient care, including 35 classified as “immediate jeopardy”—situations that led or could lead to serious harm or injury. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the degree to which Steward’s business choices contributed to poor treatment, academic research has shown that systemic issues, not individual errors, typically lie at the root of malpractice. Steward’s bankruptcy paused many of the malpractice suits, making it difficult or impossible for attorneys to depose medical staff or obtain company records—information that could link their allegations of malpractice to cost-cutting decisions. But what is clear, experts say, is that a pattern of substandard care arose as Steward and its partners prioritized their bottom lines. (Steward declined to answer detailed questions from Mother Jones.) “Steward made a decision somewhere along the line that in order to keep making the money they wanted to make, there were going to have to be cuts,” says Rob Higgins, a partner at the Boston malpractice firm Lubin & Meyer who has litigated dozens of cases against Steward hospitals. “The reason that there are more cases with Steward is not because they have worse doctors. It’s that they didn’t give the doctors and nurses and all the staff the resources they need to do their job the right way.” Our reporting builds on the work of other journalists and legislators who have investigated Steward’s activities. The Globe’s Spotlight team found at least 15 patients who died at Steward facilities after receiving subpar care. A Senate report from September found that heart-failure death rates at some hospitals increased by up to 40 percent on Steward’s watch, even as the national average declined. Wait times in Steward ERs were also far above the national average. Our investigation also dug up allegations of sexual assault by medical staff, lawsuits by whistleblowers who alleged they were fired for calling out Steward management, and a troubling pattern of problems in labor and delivery: We found 12 additional instances of moms and newborns who died at Steward hospitals over the last 14 years, and 21 more who suffered severe injuries. From skipped ultrasounds to inexplicable delays in emergency care, the court filings recount gutting details. One Florida woman lost her baby after waiting almost three hours for someone to perform a C-section, despite a placental abruption, excessive bleeding, and dramatic drops in the fetal heart rate; it was her ninth pregnancy and the first she’d carried to term after years of IVF. At another Steward hospital in Florida, doctors wanted to prescribe a steroid drug to treat a woman’s postpartum blood disorder, but no administrators were reachable over Labor Day weekend to approve the order, and she died. At St. Elizabeth’s, where Sungida went, another patient bled so much after giving birth that she suffered a stroke and needed brain surgery—in part because an ultrasound to assess the hemorrhage was done too late. At a Steward facility in Texas, a baby was born with severe brain injuries after staff waited almost a day to perform a C-section, despite clear signs of fetal distress. There are more cases like these: 49 of Steward’s federal deficiency reports involve maternal care. The labor and delivery problems at ­Steward hospitals are consistent with an industry cost-cutting trend: When private equity firms and other financiers buy hospitals, they tend to target obstetrics units. “There is a mismatch between how much obstetrics costs and how much revenue it generates,” explains Katy Kozhimannil, a health policy professor at the University of Minnesota who studies maternal unit closures. Insurance reimbursement rates for maternal services are notoriously low, and the costs of running a fully staffed unit—with specialized doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, and birthing equipment—can quickly outpace returns. > As the allegations of deadly neglect swirl around Steward, its investors, > executives, and partners have faced little accountability. Many hospitals eat the loss, Kozhimannil says, because maternity services fulfill a community need and align with their public mission. But investor-owned hospitals, unwilling to make that trade-off, have been closing maternity wards for years. Ascension, a Catholic hospital chain that partnered with the private equity firm TowerBrook Capital Partners, has closed more than a quarter of the labor and delivery units at its 140-plus hospitals over the last decade. Prospect Medical Holdings shuttered one of the few obstetrics units in its 16-hospital system after it was taken over by the private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners. Steward closed at least six labor units and two neonatal units, as well as three hospitals that provided obstetric services—eliminating a third of the labor units in its portfolio. As the allegations of deadly neglect swirl around Steward, its investors, executives, and partners have faced little accountability. Senators held de la Torre in criminal contempt after he refused to testify at a hearing in September, yet officials from Cerberus and MPT, the real estate investment trust, weren’t even summoned, despite their involvement in Steward’s unraveling. A number of financial analysts have published evidence showing how MPT, which still owns the real estate of dozens of Steward hospitals, used those properties in its own enrichment scheme. MPT has gone to extremes to quash the findings, paying millions of dollars to private intelligence firms to target Steward’s critics, filing a defamation lawsuit, and subpoenaing those who dare speak to the press. The broader Steward saga is stunning in its complexity, brazenness, and scale, laying bare the extent to which profit-­seeking and patient care are incompatible, and the lengths to which corporate titans have gone to hide that reality. “All of a sudden, somewhere, there’s a switch that turns that says, maybe we can make a boatload of money,” Higgins says. “They were living a lifestyle of NBA basketball players that have hundreds of millions of dollars. And it’s scary to think that for a long period of time, they were running these hospitals the way they were.” Nabil got to Boston Medical around midnight. He was ushered into an empty waiting room and told to make himself comfortable: His wife’s surgery would be long. He called his parents and made plans for them to fly to Boston to help during what surely would be a difficult recovery. Barely an hour later, a surgeon appeared. They had tried everything, but the bleeding was too severe. There was just too much damage to her liver. Sungida was dead. “How?” Nabil asked in disbelief. “We don’t know,” the doctor said. He told Nabil he could request an autopsy. > “I will say it bluntly. Turning private equity loose in our health care system > kills people.” Nabil sat in the waiting room, stunned. Just hours ago, he and Sungida had been talking about watching a movie together. Now he was texting relatives with the unspeakable news. He was eventually led through a maze of hallways and into a basement room where a staffer pulled back a curtain and revealed his wife’s body, covered with a sheet. “It was so scary seeing her lifeless,” he says. “I couldn’t stand there for more than five minutes.” Someone called him an Uber. When he got back to his apartment at 4 a.m., Nabil saw Sungida everywhere: in her beloved saris and half-used perfume bottles and the suitcase of pre-pregnancy clothes she hadn’t yet unpacked because none of them fit. He opened the fridge to find the food she’d prepared for their first days as a family of three. “I was still in shock,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what to do.” His mind turned to his daughter, and to their unfathomable future: “She was so tiny and so fragile—how is she going to survive this?” When Nabil called the nursery to check on Otindria, the nurses said she was doing fine. They asked after Sungida—they hadn’t yet heard. After the call ended, the nurses texted him photos of the baby. He couldn’t believe how much she already looked like her mother. For the rest of his life, he realized, it would be his job to convince ­Otindria that what happened wasn’t her fault. He climbed into the shower and, for the first time, allowed himself to cry. Later, he sat down and wrote a Facebook post: “Yesterday, I welcomed my daughter to this world,” it began. “Today, I am in grief losing the mother of my daughter due to unexplained medical circumstances.” He asked their friends to reminisce about Sungida and to refrain from asking medical questions. Her doctors were “bewildered,” he wrote. After a few hours of sleep, he headed back to St. Elizabeth’s to check on Otindria and attend a briefing with hospital staff. It was held just a few doors down from the recovery room where Sungida had so recently been alive, alert, and cracking jokes. Doctors and administrators crowded into the cramped room. As Nabil held his newborn, they told him that this was a freak event. They hypothesized that the hormonal roller coaster of labor and birth had caused a blood vessel in Sungida’s liver to burst. Maybe, they said, something about her liver was anatomically different. There was no mention of the repossessed coils, of the tense union meeting, or of the management’s failure to plan for this very scenario. Nabil remembers them saying repeatedly that his wife’s death was improbable and random: “They said, ‘You can think of it like your wife got hit by lightning.’” He had only one question, the one gnawing at him since the night before. Would Otindria blame herself? One of the doctors answered immediately: If she ever does, he should tell her it was the hospital’s fault. Steward’s rise and fall is a telling example of how the private equity playbook has infiltrated American life. Over the last two decades, PE firms, which invest money on behalf of wealthy clients and major investors like pension funds, have been buying up everything from family homes and apartment buildings to day cares and medical practices and transforming them into bundles of assets to be engineered for profit. They charge investors hefty management fees and, in exchange, promise market-beating returns in just a few years. To do that, they focus on cutting costs—scrimping on wages, benefits, and materials—to extract maximal returns. When President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, he unwittingly opened up a fresh prospect for private equity. The droves of newly insured Americans, the industry suspected, would mean a big revenue boost for hospitals. Community hospitals presented a particularly attractive option because Medicaid expansion meant more patients at higher reimbursement rates, and the government would likely bail out facilities that failed. Soon private equity firms were snapping up hospitals like never before. That same year, Cerberus—named for the three-headed dog who guards Hades in Greek mythology—bought six hospitals from de la Torre’s small Catholic hospital chain, Caritas, for $895 million. It put up one-third of the total in cash, and, as is common in private equity deals, financed the rest with loans loaded onto Steward’s balance sheet. Turning a nonprofit into a for-profit required approval from Massachusetts’ attorney general, which she granted on condition that Cerberus invest $400 million in hospital upgrades. Cerberus complied, but covered the cost by saddling Steward with even more debt—loans that Cerberus and its investors would not be responsible for repaying. De la Torre, now Steward’s CEO, introduced himself soon after to the staff of one of the newly acquired hospitals. To a packed auditorium, he recalled learning to scuba dive as a kid and how he’d been taught you should always go with a partner. If you encounter a shark, he joked, you grab your diving knife, stab your partner, and swim away. “He was expecting a big laugh,” one staffer who attended the speech recalls. “But what he got was gasps.” Dadu Shin Cerberus rapidly acquired five more ­Massachusetts hospitals, adding more debt to Steward’s ledger. By 2012, Steward was a $1.9 billion company with 17,000 employees, and it wasn’t long before executives’ cost-cutting efforts began drawing their ire. After the company eliminated more than 100 nursing jobs in two years, the nurses union filed more than 1,000 complaints with the state health department alleging unsafe staffing. Although Steward’s hospital portfolio was then limited to roughly a dozen facilities, it soon closed one of them and shut down pediatrics at another. It also began selling some of its buildings and renting them back. These “sale-leasebacks” ­provided a cash infusion to offset Steward’s growing debt load, which would triple during Cerberus’ first four years of ownership. In mid-2015, de la Torre flew to Alabama to meet with Edward Aldag, the unofficial king of health care sale-leasebacks. A dozen years earlier, Aldag had founded Medical Properties Trust, a one-of-a-kind real estate investment trust (REIT) that focused exclusively on doing such deals with hospitals. The men decided on the spot to work together: MPT’s annual report described them bonding over their “similar philosophies” about the future of health care. All involved had something to gain: ­Cerberus and de la Torre wanted to expand Steward, and an MPT deal would give them the cash to do it. MPT said in its annual report that it would collect rent from Steward hospitals and would have the option to buy any new facilities Steward acquired—to transform them, too, into lucrative tenants. > “It’s just this long line of rinse and repeat of basically looting safety-net > hospital systems.” By 2016, MPT had bought Steward’s nine remaining Massachusetts hospitals for $1.25 billion and leased them back at exorbitant rents. If the aim was to provide quality care, one of de la Torre’s colleagues told the Globe, this made no sense: “We all sort of nodded our heads and rolled our eyes and said, ‘Oh, now I get it. There are no plans to turn this into a viable set of community hospitals. It’s all about pulling money.’” Cerberus used proceeds from the sale to pay itself more than $700 million—a $473 million return on investment. De la Torre received a $71 million dividend. Over the next three years, Cerberus used the remaining funds to finance the purchase of 26 more hospitals in nine states, piling even more debt on Steward, whose facilities continued to face cuts. Patient care fiascoes were starting to escalate. At Good Samaritan Medical Center in 2018, a baby died when her mother’s uterus burst, according to legal filings—overworked staff had ignored her history of placental abruption. In fact, in the years after MPT first got involved, at least 20 patients died at Steward’s Massachusetts hospitals from alleged malpractice; 50 more died at its other facilities across the country during that time, according to the complaints we found. (Some of these cases were dismissed or settled; others remain open due to Steward’s bankruptcy.) In a region full of Harvard-affiliated doctors and hospitals known for being among the nation’s best, Steward’s raw Wall Street calculus was so foreign that it went virtually undetected, says Dr. Paul Hattis, a senior fellow at the Lown Institute, a health care think tank, who has served on the state’s Health Policy Commission. “I don’t think the regulatory apparatus was used to dealing with actors fueled by that kind of greed,” he says. “The money was going into the organization and then out the back door into the dividend pocket of an owner, but then neglecting patient care in the middle. That just was not something that we were used to thinking about having to protect against—the bleeding of an asset. So, you say, ‘Why didn’t regulators do more?’ I think they didn’t fully grasp what was going on until it was too late.” After Sungida’s death, Nabil’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law flew in to help. They shared his small bedroom while Nabil slept on the chaise in the living room, ­Otindria in her bassinet beside him. Every day delivered another gut punch. On Sungida’s phone, Nabil discovered a note she had written to introduce her baby to the world. He opened her inbox to find an interview offer for an economics professorship at Central Michigan University. “Seeing that email, I was like, You got everything you wanted,” he recalls. “It broke my heart.” About a month later, he got an email from a reporter at the Globe. Nurses at St. Elizabeth’s and their union had filed a complaint with the state department of health over the repossession of the embolism coils and what had happened to Sungida. He sat in his office at Boston University, unsure of what to think. He felt lost, even skeptical, but also distraught. Could this coil have saved her? Then he got a bill for the cost of her medevac to Boston Medical. Given what Nabil now knew about the coil, he wondered whether he was being asked to pay $1,076 for transport that should never have been necessary. His anger intensified when he received Sungida’s autopsy report from ­Boston Medical. It said she’d had placenta accreta, a condition that usually needs to be resolved by removing the uterus after birth. If true, that meant St. Elizabeth’s had missed it—yet another glaring shortfall, he thought, in Sungida’s care. He emailed the hospital’s chief medical officer, who in a subsequent briefing disputed the autopsy findings, insisting that there was no placenta accreta—and that her liver was the only problem. > Sometimes, at night, he would hold Otindria close and whisper into the > darkness: “Your childhood would be so different if it was the other parent.” Back home with Otindria, Nabil settled into a routine he repeated every three hours: feeding, fresh diaper, back to sleep. Scrolling Netflix one night, he came across the movie Fatherhood, which follows a dad (Kevin Hart) whose wife dies in a Boston hospital after giving birth to their daughter. The parallels felt uncanny. Hart’s character wrestles with whether to move home to the Midwest, where his mother can help care for the baby. Nabil faced the same dilemma. Sungida’s greatest hope had been for her girl to grow into an independent woman in a place where she would face fewer limits. But he was overwhelmed by the thought of caring for Otindria alone. He decided to go back to Dhaka. As he planned the move, Nabil thought often about how Sungida would have handled the situation so much better. She would have figured out a way to keep Otindria in America and put up a stronger fight to find out what had happened at the hospital. Sometimes, at night, he would hold Otindria close and whisper into the darkness: “Your childhood would be so different if it was the other parent.” If she had to lose a parent, he thought to himself, it should have been him. In the years before Sungida’s death, MPT acquired one Steward hospital after another, binding each facility to a high-rent lease. Steward began to cut costs even more aggressively. In 2017, it closed the maternity ward at a hospital in southeastern Massachusetts. The next year, it shut down Northside Regional Medical Center in Youngstown, Ohio, which housed the city’s only labor and delivery unit. In 2019, it closed its hospital in Phoenix and a neonatal unit in Easton, Pennsylvania. When the pandemic hit, it threatened to shutter the Easton facility altogether, demanding $40 million from the state to stay open—the governor granted $8 million. Steward took the money, closed the obstetrics unit, and sold the hospital three months later for $15 million. Steward’s other hospitals deteriorated, according to government proceedings. Janitors at its Haverhill, Massachusetts, facility were buying toilet paper for patients with their own money. At St. Elizabeth’s, nurses purchased specialized bereavement boxes for stillborn babies after the hospital ran out. In West Monroe, Louisiana, a nurse practitioner discovered that Steward had stopped paying its on-call cardiologist as the doctor was caring for a patient in the middle of a heart attack. The company seemed to be bleeding money: It reported losses of $207 million in 2017 and $271 million in 2018. During the pandemic, Steward claimed its largest loss ever—$408 million—despite record levels of government assistance. The company also faced a criminal inquiry in Malta, tied to a $4.35 billion contract it had won to operate three government hospitals in the island nation. Millions in taxpayer funds earmarked for improving the facilities seemed to disappear; Maltese officials sued Steward, accusing it of using the money for bribes and kickbacks and to “unjustly enrich itself.” (Their investigation is ongoing.) > In some years, Steward hospitals made up more than a third of MPT’s assets and > almost half of its revenue. If Steward died, it could take MPT with it. By the end of 2019, Cerberus executives began expressing concern to investors. Then, in May 2020, they engineered a complex transaction that transferred the firm’s $350 million stake in Steward to de la Torre and other Steward leaders as a loan, giving them five years to pay it back. Experts wondered whether this hinted at an impending collapse: In bankruptcy proceedings, lenders tend to get paid whereas stockholders don’t. (Cerberus has denied that this was its motivation.) MPT, too, was thinking about how to protect its bottom line. For the real estate trust, Steward’s survival was existential. In some years, its hospitals made up more than a third of MPT’s assets and almost half of its revenue. If Steward died, it could take MPT with it. Its solution was a top-secret plan executives dubbed “Project Easter,” according to internal documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Publicly, MPT expressed optimism. In an early 2021 earnings call, CEO Aldag bragged that the company “has the strongest portfolio of hospitals in the world.” But privately, according to the OCCRP’s documents, MPT executives knew Steward was desperate for cash, so they devised a scheme that would keep it afloat while enriching executives of all three companies. In the summer of 2020, MPT purchased several Steward properties, pouring $400 million into the company. Six months later, it loaned Steward $335 million to help buy out Cerberus’ stake, bringing the private equity firm’s total profit from its ownership of Steward to $800 million. That same month, Steward paid its investors $111 million, which included about $83 million for de la Torre; MPT, which owned almost 10 percent of Steward, pocketed a cool $11 million. When MPT disclosed the deal in federal filings four months later, the financial press took notice. Not only was the deal “unusual,” per Bloomberg, but it revealed a growing private equity pattern, wherein a sort of Russian nesting doll of financiers work together to make money off struggling hospitals. After the Wall Street Journal and others wrote about the deal, Rob Simone, an investment analyst in suburban Connecticut, began seeing a surge of interest. Simone, 40, was a REIT specialist at Hedgeye, a research firm that does deep dives on stocks and sells them to portfolio managers. Suddenly, client after client was inquiring about MPT, which is publicly traded. Poring over the firm’s financial filings, Simone began to suspect that MPT was propping up Steward well beyond the Cerberus deal, an arrangement he called “a perverse marriage” when we spoke last year. He started publishing research to this effect, and laying out the details on Hedgeye’s YouTube channel in his crisp, fast-talking style. MPT had announced, for example, that it was investing $169 million in a new Steward facility in Texas. A bit of Googling revealed that the project was slated for Texarkana, a small city on the state’s eastern edge. This piqued Simone’s interest: Texarkana’s population was shrinking, and it already had a perfectly good hospital. Developing a pricey new one made no sense. By now, Simone knew MPT’s “special sauce” was buying up struggling safety-net hospitals, which are particularly vulnerable to the devil’s bargain of sale-leasebacks. Indeed, MPT’s high rents have cratered hospital systems in multiple states. Facilities can’t keep up, and they inevitably slash services or close down. Pipeline Health, for instance, declared bankruptcy in 2021, about a year after MPT bought its Los Angeles hospitals. A profitable community hospital in Watsonville, California, closed two years after MPT purchased it. “It’s just this long line of rinse and repeat of basically looting safety-net hospital systems,” Simone says. > It occurred to Simone: What if all this new investment was just a way of > funneling cash back into MPT’s trail of failing hospitals? MPT’s compensation scheme was also quite unusual for a REIT: Executive pay was tied to the dollar value of its acquisitions. The more hospitals MPT bought, and the more it paid for them, the more money the executives brought home. “You don’t just get compensated for paying the highest price, but also to go out and buy anything,” Simone says. “I knew right away when I saw that, this was going to be a bad outcome.” After each hospital system faltered, MPT would buy a new one and issue a flurry of press releases. It occurred to Simone: What if all this new investment was just a way of funneling cash back into MPT’s trail of failing hospitals? Wasn’t this similar to a Ponzi scheme, in that MPT brought on new tenants who could afford to pay the rent to help prop up the older ones who couldn’t? (In a letter to senators, MPT denied the allegation that it is a Ponzi scheme.) Simone hired a photographer to check out the Texarkana project. Financial statements said MPT and Steward were more than $50 million into the build, but the photographer sent back shots of an empty field. In one, a portable toilet lay toppled over. “$50 million was literally tumbleweeds,” Simone says. The photos further fueled his hunch that MPT was covering up Steward’s money problems by providing it cash that would come back to MPT as rent—payments MPT could then record as earnings to maintain a facade of business success. (In 2023, MPT commissioned an investigation that found no evidence of this.) Simone published his Texarkana findings, affirming his earlier recommendation that his firm’s clients should short MPT—bet on the future decline of its stock. Soon after, he received anonymous death threats. Trolls on X went after him incessantly, even posting his home address and the country club to which he belongs. But Simone’s reports motivated other analysts and short sellers to look into MPT. The most prominent was Viceroy Research, which had played a key role in exposing one of Europe’s greatest recent frauds—that of payment processor Wirecard, whose top executives now face criminal charges. In 2023, Viceroy expanded on Simone’s findings, claiming that one of the ways MPT seemed to funnel money to Steward was by dramatically overvaluing its hospitals, according to legal filings. Viceroy calculated that MPT may have overpaid Steward by at least $1 billion for its real estate. For example, it loaned Steward $1.4 billion to buy a chain of 19 hospitals, but soon ­forgave $700 million of the loan. In another case, Steward bought a Texas hospital for $11.7 million and sold it to MPT the same day for $26 million. (MPT sued Viceroy and claimed its underwriting process for determining hospital values is accurate. The case was settled in December.) There were other projects that seemed off. In 2021, Steward announced plans to build a state-of-the-art hospital in Utah, on a parcel of “trust land”—federally owned land bestowed to states to use for public benefit. To this day, the site remains an empty, overgrown field, yet another expensive project that may have existed only on paper. In 2022, Steward spent $60 million on a shuttered Miami hospital that it never reopened. (MPT did not respond to questions about its involvement in these hospital purchases.) But no amount of financial contortion could stop Steward’s downward spiral. As the hospital closures continued, dozens of lawsuits from staff and stiffed vendors piled up, and the federal government sued the company, alleging Medicare fraud. In September 2023, a sales rep marched into St. Elizabeth’s to repossess the embolism coils that, three weeks later, might have saved Sungida’s life. > “I don’t think the regulatory apparatus was used to dealing with actors fueled > by that kind of greed.” Simone is a finance guy, and his research is aimed at helping investors. But as a father of three, he never lost sight of the likely human toll of MPT’s accounting tricks. Without MPT propping it up, he says, “Steward would have become a bankruptcy years ago.” About five years, he figures—five fewer years of “patients dying, hospitals closing, vendors not getting paid…everything would have been pulled forward in time and ended.” In late January 2024, Nabil flew with ­Otindria to Bangladesh. Days later, the Globe published its story about ­Sungida’s death. It sparked a national reckoning. That’s “what finally blew the lid off all this,” a St. Elizabeth’s nurse told lawmakers at a subsequent Senate hearing. That spring, Steward’s bankruptcy proceedings revealed more details about its looting of patient care: It owed nearly $300 million in unpaid wages, including more than $105 million to doctors and $42 million to a single nurse staffing agency. It owed almost $1 billion to various vendors, including $79 million to suppliers of care items ranging from sterilization equipment to newborn test kits. Two Senate committees launched investigations into Steward and the broader trend of private equity in health care. Several states commenced their own accountability efforts—a blistering hearing in Louisiana, an investigation in Arizona, and a new law in Massachusetts that subjects private equity hospital owners to extra scrutiny and prevents them from selling hospital real estate to entities like MPT. Sen. Markey introduced a federal bill, though it has yet to move out of committee, that would regulate PE health care purchases. As Steward fell apart, so did Nabil’s vision of his future. He and Sungida had relished the idea of parenting on their own—the “American struggle,” they’d called it. Now he was back with his parents, who spent hours each day caring for Otindria. It wasn’t the life he’d imagined. He knows living in Dhaka has its benefits. His daughter will be adept in both Bangla and English. Her grandparents have become her best friends—each morning, Otindria drags her grandfather out on a walk to pet the neighborhood goat. But still, to Nabil, every day in Bangladesh feels like a small betrayal. “I didn’t want it to be her home, and her mother didn’t want it to be her home,” he told me. “That’s the broken promise that bothers me a lot.” > St. Elizabeth’s was briefly engulfed by another private equity giant, Apollo > Global Management, before Massachusetts seized it through eminent domain. He tries not to let it show. When I visited Dhaka in February, ­Otindria toddled through the apartment like a tiny queen, with Nabil as her cheerful attendant. He set up her Hello Kitty playpen in the living room, retrieved stuffed animals, and snuck her jalebi, a fried sweet, in between meals. Beneath the photos of Sungida that line most of the walls, he threw himself into playing with his daughter, never letting on that each parenting moment is tinged with sorrow. “I see ­Otindria doing everything Sungida would have wanted her to do,” he says. “But she’s not here to see it.” Nabil has grown angrier at the system that upended his life. In the spring of 2024, he began discussions with a law firm about suing Steward. (He is now pursuing a case as part of the bankruptcy.) A few months later, de la Torre—Steward’s now-former CEO—was spotted at the Olympics in Paris, attending the equestrian dressage competition at Versailles. Federal agents briefly detained him this past fall, serving a search warrant and seizing his phone—potential signs of a federal probe. But as of this writing, neither he nor anyone else involved has been charged with a crime. MPT continues to do its business with Aldag at the helm—in January, another of its hospital chains, Prospect, declared bankruptcy. ­Stephen Feinberg, the billionaire co-CEO of Cerberus, was recently sworn in as the No. 2 at the Pentagon. The 34 hospitals Steward owned when it declared bankruptcy are now in chaos. There have been hundreds of layoffs as new operators take control, and several closures. St. Elizabeth’s was briefly engulfed by another private equity giant, Apollo Global Management, before Massachusetts seized it through eminent domain and assigned ownership to Boston Medical Center—the same hospital system to which Sungida had been transferred. In October, thousands of miles from this tempest, Otindria turned 1. Sungida and Nabil had agreed during her pregnancy that they wouldn’t host a blowout for their daughter’s first birthday—it felt silly when she wouldn’t care or remember. But Nabil’s parents insisted on a party. Nabil usually rushes home from work to be with his daughter, but that night, he worked late on purpose: This birthday party felt like yet another detour from the couple’s plans, and he couldn’t stomach it—nor dissociate it from the worst day of his life. When he thinks about the future now, everything revolves around Otindria. He daydreams about teaching her to drive one day, just as he taught Sungida when they were graduate students. He isn’t worried about his daughter making good grades or getting into a top college—things Sungida would have worried about. All he wants for her is joy. “Be a chef, go to a party school, travel,” he says. “Enjoy your world.” Nabil no longer can say with any certainty that he and his daughter will leave Bangladesh when Otindria is older. He’d like to, but he’s loath to make any plans. “The future that I wanted imploded on me,” he says. “So now, I am scared to dream.”

Daniel Espinoza first saw his future wife from across the room at a dim Las Vegas casino. It was New Year’s Eve 2014, and a beautiful woman with big brown eyes and dirty-blond hair was playing slots. ­Espinoza, a construction worker and party boy who was about to turn 30, sat down next to her. Julia was bubbly and confident, and, Espinoza soon found out, made her living as an escort. Their relationship quickly went from “zero to a hundred,” says Espinoza. A month after they met, she had effectively moved into his Las Vegas apartment. A couple of days later, she brought home two Chihuahuas: Skinny Mini for her and Fatty for him. Soon after, the couple traveled to the Mexican village where Espinoza grew up, and he introduced Julia, a white 33-year-old from New York, to his mother. Then, surrounded by a small group of friends and family, they got married in a civil ceremony. Espinoza never saw himself as the settling-­down type, but when Julia told him that year that she was pregnant, he literally jumped with joy. “It was the best feeling of my life,” he says. Each night, he’d listen to Julia’s belly and assure his son-to-be that his father would protect him. But Espinoza knew his son would face his share of challenges. Julia, whose last name has been omitted to protect her privacy, had a long history of using heroin. A few weeks after their son was born, in late 2015, Julia was incarcerated for nearly two years for a parole violation, leaving Espinoza with the infant. (Child Protective Services, which got involved after the child’s birth, had deemed Espinoza a safe caregiver.) Sometimes, Espinoza hired a babysitter; sometimes, he brought his son with him to construction sites. He called his son “my little engine,” because, he says, “he kept me going forward.” In 2018, after Julia had returned, their second child, a girl, was born. A year later, Julia found out she was pregnant again, and the family moved into a bigger home. Espinoza was buoyed by the news of each pregnancy. “A kid, for me, is another reason to live,” he says. The couple’s relationship was difficult to categorize: They were married, they loved each other, and they co-parented, but by the third pregnancy, their dynamic had become strained. Espinoza was frustrated by Julia’s continued drug use and didn’t want her friends around, because some of them used, too. She began spending more and more time away from home, saying she needed space. What Espinoza didn’t know was that Julia had learned about a new way to make money to support her addiction: putting their baby up for adoption. On Google, she found an agency in Utah, Brighter Adoptions, that would provide an apartment, medical care, and a weekly allowance during her pregnancy. Once she had the baby and signed the adoption papers, she would receive even more cash. Not that she really thought she would relinquish her baby, she told me recently. “I was on ­heroin at the time,” she said, “and so at first, it started out like kind of a hustle for me.” Eight weeks before her due date, she hitched a ride with a friend to Layton Meadows, a sprawling apartment complex just north of Salt Lake City. It’s one of the many places where Utah’s cottage industry of adoption agencies houses expecting mothers, who are enticed by free lodging and cash stipends. Depending on whom you ask, the state’s laws are the most “adoption-friendly”—or the most exploitative—in the country. Many states allow mothers to change their minds days or even weeks after consenting to adoption, but in Utah, no such safeguard exists: Once the papers are signed, the decision is irreversible. While married fathers must be notified of adoption proceedings, the children of unwed fathers can be placed for adoption without notification or consent. Like other states, Utah prohibits adoptive parents from paying pregnant women to give up their children, but there’s no cap for how much they can pay for services related to the pregnancy, as long as the expenses are “reasonable.” And Utah is the only state where finalized adoptions can’t be dismissed even if the adoption was fraudulent. > “It’s shark-infested waters to procure moms, to then procure their children, > to then broker the baby to an adoptive parent.” Wesley Hutchins, an attorney in Salt Lake City who has helped facilitate more than 1,400 adoptions, is blunt in his critique of the state’s laws: “You can lie, you can misrepresent, you can do pretty much everything you want.” Adoption has long been embraced across the political spectrum as a sort of panacea: a solution to unplanned pregnancies, an answer to infertility, a benevolent way to grow families. In the two years since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision—in which Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that adoption helps avoid the “consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood”—lawmakers in conservative states that have enacted abortion bans have doubled down on promoting and incentivizing adoption, with glossy promotional campaigns, tax credits for adoptive parents, and changes to high school sex-ed curricula to promote adoption. In May 2024, Senate Republicans introduced the More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed (MOMS) Act, which would establish Pregnancy.gov as a clearinghouse of pregnancy and parenting resources that would show adoption agencies, but not abortion clinics. Yet experts worry that the enthusiasm for adoption is fueling an industry that has long been analogized to the Wild West—one in which scattershot, state-by-state regulatory oversight and the desperation of birth and adoptive parents alike create conditions for predatory adoption operators to flourish. Birth mothers typically come from poverty and often lack stable housing and other support systems. Adoptive parents, who, according to some estimates, outnumber available infants 45 to 1, routinely pay upward of $80,000 to adopt. “It’s shark-infested waters to procure moms, to then procure their children, to then broker the baby to an adoptive parent,” says Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, the policy director at Ethical Family Building, a nonprofit that advocates adoption reform. “People are competing for women.” Utah may be the most extreme version of what it looks like to champion adoption with little oversight, but when it comes to reproductive justice, the extremes have a way of becoming the new normal. Hutchins says adoption lawyers frequently discuss making states more adoption-friendly. He lists the typical questions: “Where’s the easiest place for adoptions to be performed? Where’s the easiest place to get around the rights of biological parents?” The answer? “Time and time again, that comes up as being Utah.” Najeebah Al-Ghadban Sandi Quick, the owner of Brighter Adoptions, was waiting at the apartment complex when Julia arrived. Quick facilitated about 50 adoptions a year, in addition to taking care of more than a dozen children of her own, but in the days to follow, she made Julia feel like her only focus. Quick texted to make sure Julia had woken up for various appointments, provided rides to her new doctor, and even gave her quarters for laundry. This attention was key to Quick’s philosophy. Birth mothers “are some of my favorite people,” she wrote on the agency’s website. “There is no greater act of love than to put that tiny one’s needs above your own desires.” Julia was chatty over text, writing about what she was up to (perusing adoptive parent profiles, walking to Dollar General), how cute her kids are (Im not just saying that cause they are mine, she wrote), and what Espinoza thought of her drug use (Hes a lil judgemental on that cause im their mom and i am too). As for Quick, Julia wrote, You truely must be an angel. On the intake paperwork, Julia did not disclose that she was married to Espinoza, instead checking the box for “single.” She was, however, upfront about her drug use, noting that she’d last used meth “a few months ago” and last injected heroin “days ago.” (The adoption paperwork, as well as the text exchanges, were later introduced as court records.) Quick assumed Julia was using while in Utah, but this wasn’t particularly out of the norm. As one Layton Meadows resident told me, so many of Brighter Adoption’s clients there are on drugs that they’ve come up with a nickname for themselves, a combination of “Sandi” and “Xanax”: “Xandi’s girls.” Quick later said in a deposition, “These girls that need our help are the ones that are going to have a record a mile long, and that will not stop us from helping them.” Three days after Julia arrived in Utah, she flew to Las Vegas. She said she planned to pick up her car and drive back that night. The next morning, when Quick hadn’t heard from her, she sent a series of texts asking where Julia was and when she was coming back. Over the coming days, Julia was in sporadic touch, offering excuses for why she was lingering in Las Vegas: Her daughter had been in the emergency room; she needed an oil change; she was in jail for a few days over outstanding warrants. Finally, Julia said she was ready to head back, but she’d used some of her weekly stipend to pay for bail. She asked Quick to send gas money. It would be the first of many exchanges in which Julia wanted cash and Quick wanted her to return to Utah. At first, Quick was skeptical. I could wire you the money to money gram but I’m extremely nervous that you won’t come back again. But by that afternoon, Quick had relented, sending Julia the money—only for Julia to go dark again. Quick sent a string of texts asking where she was, pleading, please come back!!! > “Get on the road right now and make it to Utah,” Quick texted Julia. “I will > moneygram.“ Eventually, after almost two weeks away, Julia returned to Layton Meadows, where she spoke with two sets of prospective adoptive parents over the phone, weeping in between. There were only two couples, Quick acknowledged, because “there are no more open to the IV heroin.” (Drug use during pregnancy can cause health complications for the developing fetus, including withdrawal symptoms after birth.) Julia liked the second couple, Mary and Perry. Perry was a pilot who had recently started a church congregation in their small Alabama town. (At the couple’s request, Mother Jones is not using their last name.) They were ecstatic about adopting and seemed kind, sending Julia flowers and asking how much contact she wanted to have with them before she gave birth. It was around the time Julia spoke with the couple that she started feeling stuck. What had begun as a way to get some easy money was turning into a real plan to place her child for adoption. If she backed out, Mary would be heartbroken, but if she went ahead, she risked devastating Espinoza. “It was a bad situation,” Julia told me. “I was just hustling for money, but I don’t have a hateful heart.” Then again, she thought, perhaps adoption wasn’t the worst idea. She was addicted and overwhelmed by the prospect of more kids. In mid-November, Julia texted Quick from Las Vegas to say she’d started having slight contractions. Get on the road right now and make it to Utah, Quick replied. I will moneygram. Arrangements like this one, in which a pregnant woman coming from Nevada and a couple in Alabama plan for a potential adoption in Utah, are possible due to a constellation of individuals and organizations across the country that enable, and often profit from, adoptions. “Facilitators,” the organizations that find pregnant women considering adoption, frequently target poor women living in places with restrictive abortion laws. A Birthmother’s Choice, a facilitator that Brighter Adoptions has worked with, offers not only free housing and financial help to pregnant women, but also fun weekly outings and amenities like pools and transportation to shopping centers. Targeted Google ads are key to ­finding women. A Birthmother’s Choice pays for ads to come up in response to Google searches like “adoption agencies near me,” “i’m pregnant now what,” “how do i stop pregnancy,” and, strikingly, “planned ­parenthood of tennessee” and “planned parenthood in pa.” Ranyard, who tracks the adoption ­industry’s trends, says that since Dobbs, facilitators and agencies have been more ­aggressive about targeting pregnant women with financial incentives. Ads for A Birthmother’s Choice, for example, read “Get Paid for Adoption.” “Consultants,” meanwhile, find aspiring adoptive parents. For years, Brighter Adoptions has worked with Faithful Adoption Consultants, a Georgia-based organization that, as of 2018, required prospective adoptive parents to pay a $4,000 fee and get a signoff from a pastor stating the couple is active in a pro-life church. A form for ­prospective parents includes questions like “Please tell us your understanding of the gospel and briefly describe your salvation experience,” and “In what ways do you represent Christ in your home?” Over the past 15 years, the organization has helped place more than 2,000 babies. > Recent keywords that Brighter Adoptions paid for include “pregnant homeless > need help,” “places for pregnant women to live,” and “do birth mothers get > paid for adoption.” In the middle are adoption agencies, which sell themselves as supporting pregnant women in crisis while finding loving homes for their children. They, too, use aggressive Google ad targeting. For many, the top expense—more than legal fees or support services for women—is marketing to pregnant women considering adoption. Recent keywords that Brighter Adoptions paid for include “pregnant homeless need help,” “places for pregnant women to live,” and “do birth mothers get paid for adoption.” If one searches “giving baby up for adoption,” ads for Brighter pop up in 30 states. In an email, Quick said her work reflects a need for a stronger social safety net, including better access to health care, child care, services to combat the opioid crisis, and support for victims of domestic violence. “Without such changes, however, many women are forced into heartbreaking decisions about their futures, their bodies, and the children they bring into the world,” she wrote. “I am someone who ends up filling these gaps where our social safety nets fall short…The work I do isn’t easy, but it is essential.” (Quick didn’t comment on Espinoza and Julia’s case out of a desire to protect “the privacy and safety of the mother.”) But agencies requiring women to travel to Utah or other “adoption-friendly” states put their clients in compromising positions, says Ashley Mitchell, who runs Knee to Knee, a support program for birth mothers. Isolated from their communities, women can become dependent on an agency that keeps track of the details of their lives. Mothers working with Brighter sign forms allowing the agency to communicate directly with their health care providers, including accessing information discussed in counseling sessions that may be relevant to the adoption. The paperwork adds that adoption is a “highly confidential and protected service,” but “if you chose to air grievances on social media about Brighter Adoptions you are waiving your right to privacy.” “There is a very thin line between the ethical practice of adoption and a reproductive trafficking situation,” Mitchell says. “I think it’s very easy to cross that line.” In 2018, Tia Goins, a new mother in Detroit in the midst of a housing crisis and postpartum depression, Googled adoption options. As The Cut recently chronicled, she got a phone call from Flossie Green, a facilitator who works with A Birthmother’s Choice, and within 24 hours was on a plane from Detroit to Utah to place her 3-month-old for adoption with Brighter Adoptions. Goins immediately had second thoughts, telling Quick on her second day in Utah that she wanted to call off the adoption. But, she says, Quick said she was busy. The following morning, Shaylee Budora—Quick’s daughter and a counselor with the agency—showed up at Goins’ hotel room with a notary public and relinquishment papers. “I’m in a whole other state with a whole newborn, around these people that I really didn’t know from a can of paint telling me they’re gonna help me,” Goins told me. “What do I do? I don’t have any way back home. I don’t have any money to get back home. So what do I do?” She signed the papers, the adoptive couple appeared in the room, and, in tears, Goins handed them her child. “It happened so fast,” Goins says. Only then did Quick coordinate her flight home. On the way to the airport, she gave Goins $4,000 in cash. According to the paperwork that Brighter Adoptions uses today, mothers who place their children for adoption are provided financial support through an eight-week post-delivery recovery period. Mothers also sign a form acknowledging that they know that adoption is completely voluntary. In an email to Mother Jones, Budora wrote, “If a client shows any hesitation or doubt, the process is halted and only resumed if the client clearly indicates their desire to proceed and can articulate confidence in their decision.” Ever since that day in 2018, Goins has spent countless hours calling cops, lawyers, and state regulators in hopes of reuniting with her daughter, to no avail. She’s also reviewed the fine print of the paperwork she signed at the hotel. It notes that if a mother who’s arrived in Utah changes her mind, Brighter Adoptions will provide travel home in the form of a Greyhound bus ticket. From a young age, Quick knew she wanted a big family. She wrote about babies in her journal, prayed for babies, dreamt of babies. “I have always wanted to be a mom to the masses,” she later wrote on her personal blog, Habitat4Insanity. By the time she was 27, in 1998, she had eight children, four of whom were adopted. A year later, Quick opened her own adoption agency called A TLC Adoption. It was devoted “to placing children of color,” according to its website. Some agencies at the time charged less for Black babies, but Quick, who was white and Mormon, found this practice abhorrent. (Quick says she has since left the church.) She refused to change her rate—a minimum of $12,000 per adoption—based on race. “I wanted to spend my time doing what I love and earning money in the process so I could continue living the life I wanted to live…Above the poverty line that is,” she wrote on her blog. It was a good time to get into the adoption industry in Utah. In the mid-’90s, state policymakers, concerned about what they said was an epidemic of children born out of wedlock, passed legislation stipulating that unwed fathers didn’t need to be notified of adoption proceedings. The act of having sex was reason enough for him to “be on notice that a pregnancy and an adoption proceeding regarding that child may occur,” according to the legislation. State law also stipulated that fraud wasn’t grounds for the dismissal of an adoption. > What may have started as religiously motivated, pro-adoption state policies > have since boosted an industry that now pulls in adoptive and birth parents > from all over the country. During legislative deliberations, Rep. Mary Carlson, a Democrat representing Salt Lake City, worried aloud that under the new law, birth fathers who were lied to wouldn’t have legal recourse. “We have basically undermined the ability of a father to have a part of the child’s life,” she said. Among those lobbying for the legislation were attorneys from Kirton McConkie, the law firm representing the Mormon Church. Over the years, the firm has used its considerable sway to push adoption-friendly laws. In the Mormon faith, a couple is married for eternity and their children are sealed to them in an eternal family. For some Mormons, the motivation to adopt comes from a desire to place children into those eternal family units, says Hutchins, the adoption attorney. He describes himself as a pro-adoption Mormon, but he notes that in some cases, church members use the faith to justify adoption practices that are unethical or illegal. “They feel like the ends justify the means,” he says. “They’re getting children out of one-parent, problematic homes into stable, two-parent homes.” What may have started as religiously motivated, pro-adoption state policies have since boosted an industry that now pulls in adoptive and birth parents from all over the country. Quick’s agency hit the ground running, placing 306 babies in almost seven years. She also grew her own family with the help of TLC. When the agency couldn’t find a placement for a baby boy in 2002, “I hopped my ass on a plane to pick up my new son,” she wrote. The same thing happened with a baby girl four months later and then again the following year. By 2005, she had 13 children. Quick shut down TLC the following year, amid a crumbling marriage and financial troubles. By 2011, she was working for an agency called Heart and Soul Adoptions, run by her good friend Denise Garza. The two women had a lot in common: Garza was also an adoptive parent of several children who had helped facilitate hundreds of adoptions. Quick worked at Heart and Soul for six years before peeling off to start Brighter Adoptions in 2017. A year later, state regulators shut down Heart and Soul for 22 violations, including defrauding adoptive parents, falsifying documents, and paying pregnant women amounts of money that “very well may incentivize their decision to relinquish,” according to a judge’s order. (Quick was only briefly mentioned in the order, in reference to submitting a receipt without referencing what it was for.) Garza’s license was revoked for five years. Contrary to the state’s orders, Garza kept working in adoption, referring pregnant women to Brighter and giving the women rides. When state regulators caught wind of Garza’s involvement in 2019, Brighter Adoptions was demoted to a conditional license for five months and ordered to stop associating with Garza. But Brighter kept working with Garza. In 2022, Garza applied for personal bankruptcy on two separate occasions. She was entering her fourth year of being shut out of the adoption industry and was deep in debt, with eight children living at home and a potential foreclosure on a $1.4 million house. Buried in the bankruptcy filings, though, Garza noted that she was still making some money: specifically, $13,700 per month as a “consultant” for Brighter Adoptions. Quick had continued to give work to her old friend after all. Garza says she takes responsibility for mistakes at Heart and Soul but noted that the claim that birth mothers are coerced into giving up their children “is unequivocally false.” She disputes the accounts of her involvement with Brighter Adoptions, saying she was not involved with the agency in 2019 or 2022. Asked to explain why the bankruptcy filings suggested otherwise, she didn’t respond. > “You kind of turn a blind eye to some degree,” said one adoptive mother. “It’s > like you’re…baiting them in.” State regulators don’t seem to have noticed the public filings. In 2023, the state restored Garza’s license, to the surprise and dismay of Utah adoption reformers, and she started another agency. Garza told the Salt Lake Tribune that she embarked on the new venture to help expecting mothers in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision. Efforts to clean up adoption in Utah have faced staunch industry pushback. In 2011, Hutchins started hearing stories about unwed fathers unwittingly losing custody of their children. As the president of a trade group called the Utah Adoption Council, he wanted to champion ethical practices. To understand what was going on, he had his then-wife call several Utah agencies, posing as the sister of an out-of-state pregnant woman interested in adoption. In recorded calls, agency representatives walked her through how she could keep the birth father from finding out about the adoption. One rep urged her to tell the birth father the baby died. Another told her that when the pregnant woman arrived in Utah, they’d give her an envelope with thousands of dollars in cash for her to spend as she wanted. When Hutchins circulated transcripts among the trade group, he redacted the names of the agencies, some of whose leaders were in the room. “The response I got was, ‘How could you do this, Wes?’” Hutchins recalls. “And my response to that was, ‘How could I not?’” He resigned from his presidency the following year over concerns about the treatment of birth fathers. In 2019, Democratic state Sen. Luz Escamilla introduced legislation to crack down on advertising by facilitators. Seeing ads about available babies on social media, she says, was “as if you were on Amazon, shopping for a dress or a piece of furniture.” But even this small regulatory step proved to be one of the most difficult bills for Escamilla to pass in her 16 years in the legislature. One adoption lawyer became so heated that Escamilla had to call security. “They’re like, ‘You’re trying to stop kids from being adopted,’” she remembers. “I’m like, ‘No, I’m trying to make sure no one is profiting off of children.’” Adoptive parents, meanwhile, are left with mixed feelings about supporting problematic practices to adopt children they love. “I am so thankful for adoption, because we wouldn’t have the family we have now if it weren’t for adoption,” one woman who adopted through Garza’s Heart and Soul told me. But, she said, “in all honesty, it still doesn’t feel like it makes it right, you know?” After adopting in Utah, the woman adopted in Florida, another state with lax regulations. She said the attorney she worked with in Florida routinely gave birth mothers gift cards worth thousands of dollars, knowing that many of the women sold them for drugs. “You’re at such a desperate point where you want a family, and you want to provide that baby that needs a family a good, loving home, and you know you can. So…you kind of turn a blind eye to some degree,” said the adoptive mother. Of the birth mothers, she said, “It’s like you’re…baiting them in.” On a chilly morning in November 2019, Julia gave birth to a boy at the Jordan Valley Medical Center just south of Salt Lake City. Two days later, Budora and a notary public visited her at the hospital to go through the adoption forms. Julia initialed them to confirm that she wasn’t under the influence of drugs, that she hadn’t received payment to induce her to place her child for adoption, and that she wasn’t married to anyone during the pregnancy. In two separate forms, she noted that Espinoza was the father, giving his full name, date of birth, and location of conception. She checked boxes indicating that she had not told Espinoza that she had traveled to Utah and that she had never experienced domestic violence with Espinoza. She initialed to indicate her understanding that, once she signed the adoption consent form, her decision was irrevocable. At 10:15 a.m., Julia signed away her rights to her son. After she signed, Julia says Quick gave her about $7,000 in cash. “Being on drugs and not really wanting to have another kid at the time—that’s why I just went ahead and did it,” Julia says. “But I didn’t know that Utah law was like that. I thought that [Espinoza] was going to be able to say he wanted the kid and they were gonna give it to him.” Back in Las Vegas, Espinoza was increasingly alarmed. He had no idea where Julia was, let alone if she’d given birth. “I tried to call her; she never answered,” he says. He went through her files and was surprised to find a sonogram from West Jordan, Utah. “I’m like, are you kidding me?” He looked up her search history and saw she’d been Googling adoption. He called agencies to ask if they knew Julia’s whereabouts. “Nobody would give me information,” he says. > “He says I sold my baby.” It wasn’t until the day after Christmas, five weeks after Julia gave birth, that she told Espinoza that she had placed their son for adoption. Espinoza found out about the adoption and wants to kill me literally, Julia texted Quick. Espinoza hadn’t been violent with her before, but now he was livid, texting her things like, If i dont get my kid today i swear on my kids u r dead julia. (Espinoza told me he didn’t mean this literally.) Don’t give him any information, Quick wrote back. Soon after, Espinoza called Quick directly, telling her that he was the father. She told him he needed to hire an attorney and bring the matter to court. Espinoza didn’t have money for a lawyer and tried to navigate Utah’s court system on his own. In January 2020, he filed a motion to stay the adoption, but he filed it incorrectly. He obtained a copy of his marriage certificate from Mexico; Julia had ripped up the couple’s copy long ago after a fight. In April, Julia and Espinoza together filed an affidavit to amend the baby’s birth certificate, saying the change was necessary because, they wrote, “Father wasn’t added at birth.” Finally, that May, Espinoza found a lawyer he could afford and soon filed a petition to vacate the adoption. Espinoza accused Brighter Adoptions and Quick of knowingly defrauding him of his parental rights and intentionally misrepresenting facts to prevent him from intervening. He presented as evidence the marriage certificate. This was key to Espinoza’s argument ­because state law stipulates that while unmarried fathers have effectively no rights, married fathers must be notified of adoption proceedings. Still, by the time he filed the petition, the adoption had been finalized. According to state law, even if Espinoza could prove the adoption was fraudulent—because he was married to Julia and hadn’t been notified about the adoption—that alone wasn’t grounds to dismiss it. Najeebah Al-Ghadban The marriage appeared to be news to Quick, according to text messages she sent Julia. You are silly you know you can’t just rip up a marriage certificate and think that you’re divorced if you do that, she texted in July. The problem though is that on multiple documents…you denied being married multiple times…The other problem is that you are living with him like you’re married. In the months since the adoption, Julia and Espinoza had continued to occupy the same space but barely exchanged words. She watched the kids during the day while he worked, and she left for the night once he came home. He was in a depressive spiral. He said he cant live life knowing his child is with someone else, Julia wrote Quick in July. He says I sold my baby. While Espinoza struggled to pay his legal bills, Quick and her agency were represented by Larry Jenkins, a giant in the world of adoption law who supervises cases for Kirton McConkie. Jenkins is the longtime chair of the Utah Adoption Council’s standards and practice committee; Quick is also a member of the council. In court documents, Jenkins argued that ­Espinoza’s marriage was “dubious,” given that the ­marriage certificate had been produced that spring and it had taken him weeks to learn about the adoption. Because ­Espinoza had “failed to identify his alleged ‘marriage’ in a timely fashion,” Jenkins argued, he didn’t have a case. Meanwhile, Julia and Quick continued to text. Julia had referred a pregnant friend to Quick, and, once her friend signed the adoption consent forms, Julia would get a referral bonus. I hope she has that baby soon cause i really need help getting my tahoe from the impound, Julia wrote. Julia knew that Espinoza had hired a lawyer, and she had told him to do whatever he had to do—just keep her out of it. He does love his kids and for the most part hes a good dad to them, she texted Quick. He paid for their every need, Julia told Quick, and made sure to leave Sundays open so he could take them on outings. Julia refused to talk about the adoption with Espinoza; inevitably, the subject resulted in explosive fights that eventually turned violent. When we spoke, Julia said that in the 10 years they’ve been together, they had “fist fought” four times. Every time, it had to do with adoption. “I’m not saying that’s ever okay,” she said recently. “The reason I think I let it go is probably I would have done the same thing if someone was giving up my kids and I couldn’t do anything about it.” She repeatedly confirmed that she didn’t choose adoption because she was scared. “He don’t hit his kids,” she said. “He loves those kids.” She added, “It’s not a situation where I’m walking on eggshells because I think he’s gonna beat me up. I wouldn’t put up with that.” (Asked about the fights, Espinoza wrote in an email, “I love her and I love my kids.” He added, “I don’t think I’m a violent person.”) In February 2021, Quick was deposed in Espinoza’s case. The deposition, which lasted nearly two hours, gave a rare glimpse into the adoption industry in Utah. Quick estimated that of 150 adoptions the agency had completed in the last three years, just five birth moms were local. Asked if Julia ever indicated that she wasn’t telling the truth, Quick replied, “Oh jeez, I don’t know that any of my birth moms are truthful people, but she didn’t—I mean, she was a typical birth mom.” Asked what, if anything, Brighter Adoptions does to ensure that birth mothers aren’t married, Quick said, “We take the birth mother’s word.” During the deposition, Quick interrupted to ask if she could take a look at her phone. It was blowing up, she said, and she wanted to make sure nobody was in labor. In the summer of 2021, Espinoza couldn’t keep up with his legal bills, and his lawyer withdrew. That November, the case was dismissed. Just a few hours before a judge dismissed the case, Quick sent Julia $375 over Cash App. It wasn’t a late payment from her pregnancy a couple of years before: Julia was pregnant again. This time, she says, she really did plan to keep the baby—but still, she approached Quick. “I knew that she would take care of me while I was pregnant,” Julia told me. “I just knew that she would give me money.” Notes from Cash App transactions suggested a similar dynamic between Quick and Julia the second time around: Julia shuttled between Las Vegas and Utah, hitting up Quick for money for things like gas, tires, and motel stays. Quick, with increasing alarm, urged Julia to return to Utah in messages like, where are you!?????!!!!!!! And stay in hotel!!!!!!!! Love you!! Over four months of Julia’s pregnancy, Quick paid her nearly $7,000, according to Cash App transactions. One payment, in December 2021, stands out: $354 for “suboxone 60 strips,” indicating that Quick paid her directly for the opioid addiction medication. When Julia arrived at Centennial Hills Hospital in Las Vegas to give birth, she still planned to keep the baby, even though she didn’t feel ready. But when hospital staffers woke her up to take her blood pressure, they noticed heroin on Julia’s pillow. She’d fallen asleep with it in her hand. Spooked that the police might get involved, Julia ran—and made her way to Utah. > Espinoza sent a desperate email to Utah’s Division of Child and Family > Services. “I’m trying to fight for my kid pls help me,” he wrote. The baby boy was born at the same Utah hospital where Julia had delivered two years earlier. Julia signed forms consenting to the adoption the next day to Mary and Perry, the same couple who had adopted her other son. Espinoza estimates that he called the hospital more than 100 times during ­Julia’s stay, until a nurse put him through to her room. Quick picked up the phone and hung up on him, he says. (“We provide legally required notice to birth fathers,” Quick said, and “follow applicable laws regarding birth father rights.”) In the days after Julia gave birth, ­Espinoza reached out to every regulatory agency he could think of. He called the police. He sent a desperate email to Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services. “How can I stop a adoption I’m the biological father the agency hide everything from me that agency offer money to send mom’s there,” he wrote. “I’m trying to fight for my kid pls help me.” He sent a similar email to a local news channel. But these efforts didn’t get him anywhere. He again tried to sue for custody. This time, he represented himself. With broken English and no legal background, he struggled to navigate the bureaucratic maze. (“Can you please tell me what paper that needs to fill out to stop the adoption process?” he wrote a judicial assistant that February. She referred him to the Self-Help Center.) The case was later dismissed. Espinoza and I first spoke this past spring, after I had come across his case in Utah’s court records system. He emailed back within hours. “I’ve been looking for this opportunity to find somebody to make it public about…about them buying kids,” he said on the phone. His voice cracked when he talked about how the older children, now 6 and 9, vaguely know that their family isn’t complete. In the months that followed, we stayed in touch. Julia agreed to talk, too. After everything, Julia and Espinoza still live ­together, with their two older kids. Julia’s ambivalence over the second adoption was palpable, her speech filled with unfinished sentences and interjections. “I don’t know why I did it again,” she said. “It’s just a hard situation to explain.” She said of Espinoza: “I do love him, and even Sandi knew. She knew I loved him.” “If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have kept the kids,” Julia concluded. “Both of them.” Eventually, I had a hard time reaching Espinoza. He wanted to share his story, he wrote in an email, but thinking about the adoptions was making him depressed all over again. It was, he said, like pressing on an injury. “IDK how to explain this feeling,” he wrote. “I just cant be ok without my kids.” If he wanted to, Espinoza could watch his children grow up—in the photos Mary posts on Facebook. There, the kids, now 5 and 2, play at the beach, in the snow, on the sidewalk. The 5-year-old has Espinoza’s round face. The 2-year-old has Julia’s big eyes. Friends comment on how much the kids have grown, how beautiful they are. The family, they say, is so blessed.

For six days, a man we’ll call Martín walked across a remote stretch of the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and southern Arizona with a guide and six other migrants. It was February 2023, and the nights were frighteningly cold. One morning, he awoke to the desert painted white—the first time he had seen snow. They walked and walked. It snowed again, and they kept walking—until Martín couldn’t walk anymore. Three months earlier, the 23-year-old had left his home in Guatemala’s western highlands. A father of three, Martín (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) had never finished elementary school, and good jobs were hard to come by. So he did what so many others from his region have done: He headed north, hoping to cross the border undetected and find better opportunities in the United States. Martín’s journey ended on a hillside in the Baboquivari Mountains, 26 miles north of the US-Mexico border. When he began suffering chest pains and stopped to rest, the group continued without him, leaving him with a gallon of water and no food. High on the mountain, his cellphone had enough service to call 911. He kept calling—11 times in total over the ensuing three days. But help never came from official channels—not from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, which has a team of search and rescue deputies, or the US Border Patrol, which has specialized search and rescue-trained agents. Instead, upward of 14 volunteers initiated a chaotic three-day mission to rescue Martín. In their multiple attempts to reach him through locked gates and terrain too punishing to navigate, one question kept surfacing: Why had the agencies tasked with rescue work along the world’s deadliest migration route failed to act? Why had they left this man to potentially die on a mountain?   Martín’s case is just one example of how the search and rescue system in the borderlands often fails migrants caught up in the US’ decadeslong efforts to deter unauthorized migration. It is symptomatic of a scattershot emergency response system with little accountability, in which responsibility for saving migrants’ lives is divided among Border Patrol agents whose primary duty is law enforcement, not search and rescue; overtaxed county search and rescue teams; and unpaid volunteers from humanitarian groups who take it upon themselves to come to migrants’ aid when no one else will. The result is a system in which stranded migrants like Martín can fall through the cracks—sometimes with deadly consequences. Migrants crossing the Southwest border have faced particularly perilous conditions since the 1990s, when the Border Patrol began implementing an immigration enforcement strategy known as “prevention through deterrence,” which closed off popular crossing points near urban ports of entry, pushing migrants into more remote parts of the Sonoran Desert. In theory, the harsh natural environment of the desert was supposed to discourage unauthorized migration. But instead of deterring migrants, these policies only made the journey more dangerous—a reality that even the Border Patrol could not ignore. From the mid-1990s, when the prevention through deterrence policies were implemented, to 2005, the number of migrant deaths approximately doubled, with the majority of the increase occurring in the Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona, sector, which includes a large swath of the Sonoran Desert. The federal government created a search and rescue training program called BORSTAR in 1998. Since then, the Border Patrol has conducted thousands of rescues along the Southwest border: In 2022, agents rescued 22,075 people, up from 12,857 in 2021 and 5,336 in 2020. That increase partly reflects overall trends in migration—border crossings surged after 2020 in large part due to Title 42, a Trump administration policy that immediately expelled migrants seeking asylum at the border, prompting more repeat crossings. It also reflects improved search and rescue infrastructure in the borderlands: Cellphone coverage has expanded in some remote parts of the Sonoran Desert, and the Department of Homeland Security has invested more money into resources like rescue beacons and placards instructing migrants to call 911 if they are in trouble. Despite these investments, migrant deaths have remained high. The Border Patrol recorded 895 deaths along the Southwest border in 2022, compared with 568 in 2021 and 254 in 2020. Given that the Border Patrol has long struggled to collect complete data on migrant deaths, those numbers are likely a significant undercount. Martín’s call for help came from a remote corner of Pima County, which sees the majority of migration-related distress calls in the Sonoran Desert, averaging four to five per day. Throughout the US, county sheriff’s offices are typically responsible for providing search and rescue services for anyone in their jurisdiction, a norm codified under Arizona state law. But unlike neighboring Cochise and Yuma counties, which respond directly to migrants calling in distress, dispatchers at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department refer all calls they suspect are migration-related to the Border Patrol—a practice that critics allege is discriminatory and results in an often-substandard emergency response. Pima County has significant resources at its disposal to respond to those calls, including seven dedicated search and rescue deputies, the volunteer-run Southern Arizona Rescue Association, helicopters, infrared cameras, drones, and a trained canine team. But according to Deputy Adam Schoonover, a public information officer for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, the Border Patrol can respond faster to lost or injured migrants in remote parts of the borderlands. “It’s all about getting the person help as quickly as possible and that has many variables to it,” he said in an email, noting that the department’s search and rescue deputies often are out on a call and may be unavailable. “BORSTAR units can respond faster and are well equipped to handle calls for service in the border area.” The data, however, often suggests otherwise. A recent investigation by Tanvi Misra for High Country News and Type Investigations found that of the 3,000 emergency calls handled by the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector in 2022, 38 were categorized as medical emergencies, but only six appeared to have triggered a search and rescue operation. Another 299 callers routed to the Border Patrol were never found. In the absence of a reliable emergency response from local law enforcement and the Border Patrol, an informal network of volunteers with local nonprofits has for years been navigating the difficult and dangerous work of conducting search and rescue operations themselves.    The call came at 1 p.m. to the hotline run by an Arizona humanitarian aid group: A man’s brother was stranded somewhere on the US side of the border and needed help. It was Martín’s brother calling. After Martín had called 911 and no one had come for him, he tried his brother, who lives in the US and knew about the hotline. The hotline dispatcher called the Border Patrol, as is the group’s protocol, and relayed the information about Martín, including his location. Hours later, the hotline dispatcher received another call from Martín’s brother. Martín was still out there, his brother said. “Didn’t you call Border Patrol? What’s going on?” The dispatcher passed the case to the Frontera Aid Collective (FAC), another group that conducts search and rescue missions and water drops along the border. Taylor Leigh and Scott Eichling, two FAC volunteers, decided to mobilize immediately to try to rescue Martín. It was 9 p.m., and as Leigh got ready, she called the Border Patrol, “freaking out,” she said. Temperatures were already below freezing, and Martín had been out there for a night and a day. As Leigh and Eichling loaded supplies into the FAC vehicle, Leigh was transferred five times to different Border Patrol stations. She finally reached an agent, who she said told her that the Border Patrol couldn’t do anything about Martín. Eichling called back and got the same response from that agent. He called again and said another dispatcher laughed at him. Although the Border Patrol often touts the existence of BORSTAR and a more recent initiative called the Missing Migrant Program as proof of its commitment to providing search and rescue services, the reality is more nuanced. The agency’s Missing Migrant Program, which began in 2017, was responsible for installing the thousands of 911 signs and more than 170 emergency beacons along the border to facilitate rescues, but many migrants in distress are reluctant to use them until the situation is dire, knowing that contacting the Border Patrol will lead to arrest and deportation. Not only that, neither BORSTAR nor the Missing Migrant Program are independent entities with dedicated personnel to help migrants in distress. Rather, the Missing Migrant Program is a set of protocols governing how the agency responds to 911 calls from migrants and families inquiring about loved ones who have gone missing while trying to cross the border. For instance, agents first check whether the missing person is in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, before instructing a family to call their consulate for more information (as agents are typically barred from providing direct information on specific cases to civilians). Similarly, BORSTAR is not the equivalent of a dedicated search and rescue team, ready to mobilize for any emergency call. Rather, it is a relatively tiny initiative, employing roughly 300 agents spread out among the nine Border Patrol sectors along the Southwest border. Essentially, BORSTAR agents are regular Border Patrol agents with specialized training: They attend a five-week BORSTAR Academy, where they learn various search and rescue skills and become certified emergency medical technicians. Despite that training, they actually spend most of their time out in the field performing regular enforcement duties. Calls from or about lost or injured migrants forwarded to the Border Patrol by 911 dispatchers or humanitarian groups are first categorized and assessed for their urgency, then forwarded to the local Border Patrol station with details like GPS coordinates or a last known location. Rescues—which the Border Patrol also conducts for lost or injured US citizens—are handled by individual stations and often are collaborative endeavors among BORSTAR agents, regular Border Patrol agents, and Air and Marine Operations, another branch of Customs and Border Protection that deploys the helicopters and small planes patrolling the Southwest border, which can also be used for search and rescue. Occasionally, the Border Patrol will also ask local officials for assistance. > “Unless you have family who’s advocating for you and is really good at calling > a million people, you’re kind of screwed.” According to Steven Davis, a former volunteer with Pima County’s Southern Arizona Rescue Association who now volunteers with the humanitarian group the Tucson Samaritans, the Border Patrol does, in theory, have more search and rescue resources than Pima County, particularly in the remote regions of the border where people tend to run into trouble. The problem, he said, is their response is hampered by a lack of personnel to conduct large ground searches. And the Border Patrol is seen primarily as a law enforcement organization. “People often won’t call until it’s too late,” he added. Leigh echoed Davis’ observations. “Border Patrol is supposed to send out BORSTAR—or just whatever agents are in the field—to go help somebody,” she said. “But it seems like that doesn’t really happen very often or effectively. Unless you have family who’s advocating for you and is really good at calling a million people, you’re kind of screwed.” I asked Robert Daniels, a public affairs specialist for the Border Patrol, how the agency decides whether to respond to someone in distress. He denied that the Border Patrol ever declines to initiate a rescue. “We don’t do that,” he said, emphasizing that no one deserves to die crossing the desert. “We don’t tell somebody that they’re too far away, that we can’t get to them. If we can’t get to them on the ground, then we’re going to fly.” When Daniels did not respond to further calls and questions about Martín’s case, I reached out to another public affairs specialist, who spoke to me on background, reiterating that the Border Patrol will always respond to a call for help but that the agency does triage calls. If the person isn’t injured, has food and water, and is in no immediate danger from weather conditions, the Border Patrol might wait to initiate a rescue. “You’re not going to send agents up a mountain overnight in order to get somebody, or fly an aircraft into the mountains to get somebody, when they’re perfectly content and capable of being walked down the next morning,” the specialist said.                        That night, Leigh and Eichling drove south on State Route 286, a lonely two-lane highway that leads to the border. As the darkened mass of the Baboquivaris blotted out the skyline ahead, the magnitude of what they’d set out to do began to set in. Leigh and Eichling turned down a ranch road, but they kept running into locked gates, blocking their way forward. It was past midnight and they were alone on private property, so they decided to turn back. Another rescue effort that night mounted by members of the Phoenix-based Abolitionists aid group, along with another FAC duo, also proved unsuccessful. Martín would spend his second night out in the cold. In the morning, Leigh and Eichling set out again with two other FAC members, having finally identified a better route up the mountain where Martín lay. They reached a locked gate. A tense discussion ensued; one volunteer was nervous about trespassing and risking arrest. Kyle Richardson, another FAC member, was adamant they continue. “We’re not going to let this abstract law get in the way of saving him,” Richardson said. The group dismantled part of the gate to get through. Soon, the road grew so rough that they had to abandon their vehicle and walk down the private ranch road. Past a creepy-looking abandoned cabin, they finally came to a cattle tank at the base of the canyon that led up to Martín. There, they saw a Border Patrol agent sitting in his truck. Leigh explained what they were doing, and the agent pointed to the mountain in front of them. Martín, he said, was “just on the other side.” “Why aren’t you going up to him?” Leigh asked. The agent told her that his orders were to stay put. According to the Border Patrol public affairs specialist I spoke with, Border Patrol dispatchers initially had trouble locating Martín, and it was dark by the time they were able to establish contact. “We determined that he was stable and didn’t need immediate evacuation,” the specialist said, before acknowledging that humanitarian aid groups and Martín’s family might not have agreed. The group headed up the canyon. Between them and Martín lay 4 to 5 miles of dense brush and boulders. The terrain was so steep that at times they had to climb on their hands and knees. A helicopter whirred in the distance and they saw it approach, assuming it had come to rescue Martín. Instead, it hovered near the top of the mountain where they were aiming for 20 seconds and then flew away. After five or six hours, they reached a grassy saddle between two peaks. They crawled under a barbed-wire fence and walked along the trail, calling Martín’s name. Finally, they heard him. A faint yell in the distance, and then again. When they reached him, he was lying in the middle of a bare grassy hillside, extremely dehydrated and in the early stages of shock. Richardson was struck by how visible he was—his black faux leather jacket and personal belongings scattered around him stuck out vibrantly against the light green backdrop. The mood was somber as they slowly made their way back down the steep canyon, Eichling piggybacking Martín when he grew too weak to walk. Martín and his family had scraped together the equivalent of about $16,000 to pay for the journey in the hope that he would make it to the US and find work. Instead, once they reached the Border Patrol agent at the bottom of the mountain, he would be deported. In the year and a half since Martín’s rescue, volunteers in southern Arizona and along other parts of the border have continued to mount search and rescue operations for migrants, some of whom had called 911 and been transferred to the Border Patrol multiple times, but received no response. There was the woman who called for help deep in the Ironwood Forest National Monument, 25 miles northwest of Tucson. To try to find her, FAC volunteers drove on some of the worst roads they had seen in the middle of the night, far from cell service. She had moved, so they never found her, but two days later, workers on a ranch did. She was nearly dead, but they brought her to a hospital and she survived. And a few weeks after FAC rescued Martín, a 23-year-old woman, also from Guatemala, called for help from the Baboquivari Mountains. Like Martín, her family had called 911 with her exact coordinates more than 60 times, but according to Leigh, every time, the dispatcher would say, “Not Spanish,” and hang up. Frantic, the woman’s family called the hotline for help. When volunteers located the woman, she had already died. It’s difficult to know how many cases like these never received a response. A report from another humanitarian group, No More Deaths, audited 911 calls in Pima County from June 2022 and found that of 64 emergency cases received by the county and transferred to the Border Patrol during that month, there were 17 in which the distressed person was never located. In at least 10 of those cases, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department took no further action upon learning that the Border Patrol had not found the 911 caller.  > “They have been tasked with stopping an ‘invasion’ at the border. In reality, > they’re interacting with people who need basic aid, who need their asylum > applications processed.” The Border Patrol does not disclose how many emergency calls it receives or fails to act on, or the outcome of its search and rescue efforts. This lack of transparency and accountability in efforts to reduce migrant deaths has been well-documented for decades. In 2006, the federal government’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, issued a report that found that the Border Patrol’s efforts to reduce migrant deaths could not be fully evaluated due to insufficient data. The report also pointed out that the Border Patrol’s primary role as an enforcement agency often occurred simultaneously with its search and rescue activities, making it difficult to assess their efficacy. More recent GAO reports on the Missing Migrant Program have found that its recordkeeping on migrant deaths has long been incomplete and that Customs and Border Protection has not been transparent about disclosing those data limitations to Congress, though its data collection efforts have improved in recent years.   Reece Jones, a political geographer at the University of Hawaii who has written extensively about the Border Patrol, attributes the agency’s unreliable response to migrants in distress to a disconnect between its mission and the actual needs it encounters at the border. “They have been tasked with stopping an ‘invasion’ at the border,” he said. “In reality, they’re interacting with people who need basic aid, who need their asylum applications processed.” In the years since 9/11, when the agency’s mission was reframed around terrorism, the Border Patrol has grown increasingly militarized, Jones said. That militarization has only exacerbated the conflict of interest between enforcing border policies and reducing the death toll created by those same policies. “The Border Patrol hired Rambo when they needed Mother Teresa,” Jones said, paraphrasing journalist Garrett Graff. “That’s essentially the problem that’s happened over the last 20 years.” When I last spoke to Martín, he was back in his hometown, struggling to find a job. What he wants most, he told me, is the opportunity to buy a house and give his children a better future. After what happened to him, Martín has no immediate plans to cross the border again. But he has entertained other possibilities. He had heard that adults who arrive at the US-Mexico Border with their children to seek asylum, handing themselves over to the Border Patrol directly, faced an easier pathway into the United States. “Maybe it will be better with one of my children,” he told me. “Maybe I would do it.” Last November, I drove with members of FAC along a section of the border wall near Sasabe, a town straddling the border. Hundreds of migrants—many of them young children—had been arriving there, climbing through holes in the wall or walking across the border where the wall ends. They would wait for hours and sometimes days for Border Patrol agents to pick them up so they could claim asylum, a legal right under US and international law. That day, we came across two groups of 100 people or more, waiting in the shade of the wall. Twenty-five-year-old Sharon Mishell Valderramos had traveled 20 days with her son, Esquin, a smiley 6-year-old wearing a tie-dye baseball cap. “The government doesn’t protect us,” she said, when I asked her why she had left. All she wanted was to work and for Esquin to get an education. A few miles west of Sasabe, the border wall ends in a canyon known colloquially as Smuggler’s Canyon. No fence exists there, just trails crisscrossing an invisible line in the scrubby desert, where a child’s jacket hung from a bush next to the trail. I thought of how Martín had left open the possibility of another journey north, this time with his children, and what might happen if they needed help.