2026-07-18 05:07:29
An ICE detention center employee shot a woman on Thursday night after a protest outside an ICE facility in Aurora, Colorado, according to an Aurora Police Department statement released Friday afternoon. The center is operated by the private prison firm GEO Group, the largest recipient of private contracts with ICE to run immigration detention centers.
A GEO Group employee, Brandon Booth, was arrested on suspicion of attempted second-degree murder and other charges. The woman, who investigators said was part of the protest, was injured and taken to the hospital but is expected to survive. Another woman who was with her was not hurt.
According to the Aurora Police Department, Booth and other GEO Group staff were unable to enter the facility due to the protest. The two women argued with the employees and began walking away after taking photos of their cars. Booth then took out a personal firearm and fired one shot at the two women, hitting one of them in her lower body, before getting back into his car and driving away.
“We are aware that an off-duty Aurora ICE Processing Center employee was involved in a shooting incident,” a GEO Group spokesperson wrote in a statement. “This individual has been placed on unpaid administrative leave, and we will fully cooperate with law enforcement.”
“We remain committed to ensuring an ethical, thorough, objective, and comprehensive review of this case,” Aurora Chief of Police Todd Chamberlain said. “Violence of any kind will not be tolerated in Aurora. Constitutional rights are a pivotal part of a just society—violence is not.”
Allegations of violence against protesters have dogged GEO Group. An employee at Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center operated by GEO Group in Newark, New Jersey, allegedly struck a protester with his car last month. Court records show that the employee at the center of those allegations, Thomas K. Brown, claimed protesters caused him to drive his red Dodge Challenger into the woman who was struck by hitting the driver’s side of his car.
Delaney Hall staff were also alleged to have beaten and punished detainees for speaking out and organizing to protest conditions within the facility. The employees, along with federal immigration agents, allegedly denied medical care, turned off ventilation, and deployed pepper spray. Advocates say conditions in the facility have not improved even after detainees held labor and hunger strikes and attention from media and lawmakers in June.
Earlier this month, the Adams County Health Department said that GEO Group was preventing it from conducting a health investigation required by state law of the same ICE detention center in Aurora, after a possible spread of tuberculosis in the facility. On Tuesday, the Guardian reported that at least 12 detainees tested positive. One detainee told the paper that those impacted by the outbreak are being isolated in areas without air conditioning. On Tuesday, ICE denied any active tuberculosis cases, but the next day, officials said that one person who had tested positive was “treated, cleared, and removed from the country.”
2026-07-18 01:30:49
Earlier this month, ICE agents in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican man who had lived in the United States for 35 years. ICE claimed Salgado Araujo, who had been driving a van, attempted to run over an ICE agent and an officer shot him “in self-defense.” Passengers who were in the van denied Salgado Araujo attempted to ram officers and disputed that the ICE officers were ever in peril. The FBI also raised the prospect that drugs were in the van—though an attorney for the Salgado Araujo family said the substance was salt mixed with lemon and water, a concoction used by outdoor workers to combat the Texas heat.
A week later, in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE agent shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian man, as he drove a car with his three-year-old daughter present. The Department of Homeland Security said he had “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement” and an officer, “fearing for public safety,” shot him—though none of the available video confirmed that account.
There’s no reason to believe the ICE and DHS explanations in these cases, for each has been caught issuing false statements about previous episodes, including other fatal shootings, such as those of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. Since President Donald Trump initiated his brutal mass deportation campaign, the two agencies have jointly racked up a solid record of deceit and attempted cover-ups.
Here’s an incomplete list of incidents demonstrating ICE and DHS deception. The lying has become routine.
In July 2025, George Retes, a 25-year-old US citizen and Army veteran who did a tour in Iraq, was driving to his job as a security guard at a cannabis farm in southern California, where ICE and CBP agents conducting a raid had set up a roadblock. After he tried to gain permission to pass, he says, an agent pepper -sprayed him, smashed his window and dragged him out of the car. He was arrested, held in a jail for three days, and denied access to an attorney. DHS issued a statement saying he had assaulted an officer. Yet that explanation was undermined by DHS’s own action—or inaction. It did not file charges against Retes. Still, the department continued to reiterate the claim he had committed assault without bringing a case against him.
In August 2025, a man named Francisco Longoria was stopped by masked federal agents as he was driving in San Bernardino, California. When he did not obey a command to open the window and exit the car—the agents had refused to identify themselves—the officers shattered the window. As Longoria drove away, an officer fired on the car. No one was hit. DHS later said Longoria struck two officers with his vehicle and the officer had fired his gun in self-defense. Video subsequently reviewed by local journalists showed that there had been no attempt to run down the officers.
On September 30, DHS agents raided a Chicago building and detained 37 immigrants. The agency claimed the site was “filled” with Tren de Aragua gang members and violent criminals. A ProPublica investigation found that the agents arrested only two people allegedly tied to the gang. Ultimately, the raid yielded no criminal charges.
On October 4, a Border Patrol agent in Chicago shot Marimar Martinez several times while she was in her car. (She was wounded but not fatally). A DHS statement said that officers were “ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles” and that the shots were “defensive.” She was charged with assaulting federal officers with a deadly weapon. But her lawyer insisted that while she had been following the agents to warn people in the neighborhood that ICE was present, a CBP vehicle swerved into her car. Eventually body camera footage was released that confirmed his account, and the charges against her were dropped.
That month, a video of ICE officers in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, aggressively dragging a young woman out of a car, pinning her to the ground, and arresting her went viral. Tricia McLaughlin, then a DHS spokesperson, declared the video didn’t show an ICE arrest and was more than a year old. “Imagine being so desperate to demonize law enforcement you post a video from a burglary arrest Chicago Police made over a year ago,” she wrote on X. “This isn’t even ICE.” As PolitiFact subsequently noted, that was false: “Numerous videos from the incident and police statements show the video depicts an ICE arrest in Hoffman Estates.”
On October 23, 2025, Border Patrol agents under the command of Greg Bovino encountered protesters in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. Bovino fired tear gas at the crowd and later insisted that he did so after a rock was thrown at him and hit him in the helmet. DHS also made this claim. Yet in a subsequent deposition for a lawsuit filed against DHS, Bovino—after first sticking with that story—admitted no such thing happened. The federal judge overseeing that case accused him of “outright lying” during that deposition. She also said it was “difficult, if not impossible to believe” other DHS claims, such as the assertion that its agents during this incident had been attacked by gang members who had been positioned on rooftops with guns and communications gear to ambush the agents.
On January 14 in Minneapolis, an ICE agent, while trying to apprehend a Venezuelan immigrant named Alfredo Aljorna, shot his cousin, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, in the leg. DHS said the two men had violently attacked the agent—and had used a snow shovel to assault him—and the agent fired a defensive shot. But a month later, the Justice Department dropped charges that had been filed against the men, and ICE acknowledged that two of its agents had made false statements about the incident. Video showed there had been no snow shovel attack and that the ICE agent had fired a shot through the front door of Sosa-Celis’ home.
That same day in Minneapolis, two children were hospitalized after being tear-gassed near a protest against ICE. DHS blamed their parents, asserting they were “agitators.” The agency posted online, “It is horrific to see radical agitators bring children to their violent riots.” But the children were part of a family that had been in a car attempting to get home from a basketball game before being caught between ICE officers and protesters. The mother, according to CNN, had to administer CPR to her infant. Later, a DHS spokesperson acknowledged the parents were not agitators.
This is merely a partial list of DHS and ICE deception. The many lies that DHS and the Trump administration fired off about the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis have been well-documented—as has the Trump gang’s false claim that its deportation efforts are mainly targeted at criminals. These agencies and the Trump administration cannot be trusted to offer accurate accounts of their agents’ use of force and deadly violence. Which means they cannot be trusted to conduct legitimate and honest investigations of these episodes.
The recent shootings in Maine and Texas warrant independent investigations. In a previous era, the FBI might have been able to handle such an inquiry. But like all federal agencies, it has been politicized—and weaponized—by the Trump administration. That means state and local authorities available should handle these tasks
When the federal agents implementing Trump’s mass deportation crusade—who have adopted secret police tactics—mistreat, abuse, and fatally shoot residents and citizens of the United States, the public deserves answers and accountability. That won’t come from an agency and an administration that routinely lies about these tragedies.
2026-07-17 22:26:23
Donald Trump promised “really big news” in his primetime address on election integrity on Thursday night but failed to deliver any.
Instead, he recited a laundry list of disinformation and misinformation but provided no evidence votes were changed or voting systems manipulated in the election he lost six years ago.
Election experts called it “shockingly thin,” “underwhelming,” and “something less than a nothingburger.”
But that doesn’t mean the threat that Trump poses to fair elections has gone away. In fact, the speech makes it more likely that the president will ultimately take drastic action to interfere in the 2026 midterms.
Notably, the declassification of intelligence alleging that China interfered in the 2020 election, despite the fact that a 2021 review by the US National Intelligence Council found that “China did not deploy interference efforts,” is the first step in an outlandish plot by far-right election deniers to get Trump to declare a national emergency so that he can attempt to seize control of the voting system.
“Tonight’s speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections,” former White House attorney Ty Cobb told PBS prior to the speech.
Trump stopped short of doing that, for now. But he’s clearly laying the groundwork to claim those unprecedented emergency powers at some later date, possibly closer to the election, as Cobb suggests.
For the past year-and-a-half, anti-voting activists have lobbied the president to sign a 17-page executive order that would completely upend how Americans vote and have their ballots counted in an outlandish attempt to usurp powers that the Constitution explicitly gives to states and Congress. They’ve been relentlessly pushing false or inflated claims that China interfered in the 2020 election, which Trump fully embraced on Thursday, to justify the so-called national emergency.
Trump’s “speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections,” said former White House lawyer Ty Cobb.
As I reported in March, the draft order dubiously alleges that an emergency declaration would allow Trump to unilaterally outlaw mail-in voting for most Americans and seize voting machines in favor of a hand count of all ballots, which would take much longer and be far more error-prone than a regular machine count.
Additionally, the order would also require all Americans to re-register to vote in person before the 2026 midterms, effectively voiding all state voter rolls, and force voters to re-verify their status before every election, a wildly impractical measure. It would mandate that all absentee ballots be notarized and restrict mail-in voting to those who have a medical condition or are out-of-town during the election. It would require strict forms of voter ID and proof of citizenship to cast a ballot, similar to the Trump-backed Save America Act, which could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans who lack such documents. “Taken together, the proposal amounts to a radical attempt to reshape the rules of elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,” said the voting rights group Fair Fight.
The election deniers behind this push include Peter Ticktin, a Florida-based lawyer who was a former classmate of Trump’s at the New York Military Academy and represented Tina Peters, the former Colorado election clerk who was handed a nine-year sentence for giving election conspiracists access to sensitive voting equipment (she was granted clemency in May by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis).
Ticktin has had a checkered career as a lawyer. He’s been suspended twice from the Florida bar. After the 2020 election, he represented Trump in a sprawling racketeering lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton and Democrats of manufacturing allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit and ordered sanctions against Trump’s lawyers, including Ticktin.
The right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has also “been very involved” in the effort to convince Trump to sign the emergency declaration, according to Ticktin. Corsi was the driving force behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry’s military record in 2004 and the birtherism conspiracy against Barack Obama, which Trump amplified. Corsi was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller for allegedly acting as a conduit between Trump adviser Roger Stone and WikiLeaks as part of the effort to leak emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Corsi falsely claimed the emails were leaked by murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.
The once-fringe push for an emergency executive order has been amplified by influential advisers to the president. Cleta Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who helped the president attempt to overturn the 2020 election, said on a podcast in September 2025 that she believed “the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.” Mitchell convened two dozen election deniers at the White House on Monday, just days before Trump’s speech. Steve Bannon has repeatedly promoted the national emergency scenario on his radio show. And six high-ranking administration aides took part in a gathering hosted by Michael Flynn last winter where attendees called on Trump to declare a national emergency.
Of course, many of these same people were pushing Trump to do just that in 2020. In December 2020, Flynn, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne went to the White House to urge Trump to order the military to seize state voting machines. Trump was talked off the ledge by his advisers, but he has now wholeheartedly embraced the most hair-brained schemes concocted by election deniers in his inner circle. Indeed, Bill Pulte, the Trump-hatchet man turned acting Director of National Intelligence, and John Solomon, the right-wing journalist renowned for spreading misinformation have played a leading role in pushing to selectively declassify the intelligence documents that Trump prominently cited in his speech.
The entire basis for the emergency declaration is built on lies. A review by the US National Intelligence Council found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 elections.” They specifically concluded that “China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US presidential election.”
Even Solomon admitted on Thursday night he hasn’t uncovered any evidence of foreign governments altering votes in US elections. “I only know the intelligence community has zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022 or 2024,” he told MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard.
The two statutes that Ticktin claims allow Trump to declare a national emergency—the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—in fact give the president no control over the voting process. (The Supreme Court ruled in February that the president could not invoke the IEEPA to justify his tariffs.)
“None of the cited authorities delegates the president any power to change voting laws, let alone the wholesale takeover of federal and local elections that the draft EO attempts to enact, even in the face of national emergency—including attempted foreign interference,” found an analysis from the Center for American Progress.
Trump would love nothing more than to assume dictatorial powers over the election system that the Constitution prohibits the president from having. He has called on Republicans to “take over the voting in at least 15 places” and has already attempted to interfere in the midterms in a multitude of different ways.
Those efforts include:
The problem for Trump is that many of these efforts have been unsuccessful. Both of his voting-related executive orders have been blocked in court, since the Constitution is very clear that states, with oversight from Congress, run their elections. The Justice Department is 0-15 in court cases seeking to obtain state voter rolls. The Save America Act has little chance of passing.
As Trump becomes more unpopular, his administration is growing more desperate. That’s why the president is escalating his lies about the 2020 election and is being lobbied by election deniers to take more drastic actions in response to them. Thursday’s unhinged speech was the perfect illustration of that.
2026-07-17 19:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As millions of Americans prepare for another brutal heatwave, it’s now harder to find information about ways to stay cool while saving energy and keeping utility costs down.
At least 1,662 Department of Energy (DOE) webpages offering guidance on protecting the electrical grid during heatwaves have gone dark as of July 3, according to a Guardian analysis of a list of deleted URLs provided by researchers at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that hosts a repository of more than a trillion archived webpages.
These removals are just the latest example of a broader pattern: Information that conflicts with the administration’s priorities—from data on queer and trans youth to online resources from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—is being removed from federal websites and surveys.
“Republicans love to talk about consumer choice as a tenet of American freedom, but they’re actually taking that away.”
The Energy Department deletions coincide with the Trump administration’s latest push to undermine federal climate regulations. At least 18 webpages were removed within days of the proposed rollback to energy efficiency regulations for home appliances like air conditioners and heaters.
If enacted, the proposed rollback would effectively undo decades of policies that have been proven to lower household utility bills and make it much harder for the Energy Department to update efficiency standards for new appliances under future administrations, advocates say.
“Having a functioning air conditioner is a health and safety issue for the elderly, for folks with health conditions, and for the very young,” said Andrew deLaski, executive director at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a coalition of environmental, consumer and utility industry groups that advocate for cost-effective efficiency standards.
“Ensuring that the standards are up to date helps to keep their energy consumption under control so that people can afford to operate these products,” deLaski said.
It’s unclear the exact day the webpages were deleted, but several news outlets have noted that the deletions seemed to come shortly after New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, suggested New Yorkers set their air conditioners to 78 degrees to reduce strain on the city’s electrical grid.
The DOE did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about when and why the webpages were deleted and if they were related to the proposed rule to “Permanently End Green New Scam Appliance Mandates.”
For Itai Vardi, research manager at the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit fossil fuel and utility watchdog, the proposed rule and website deletions are “just absurd.”
“It’s ironic that the Trump administration and Republicans love to talk about consumer choice as a tenet of American freedom, but they’re actually taking that away,” Vardi said. “What they’re doing here is rolling back the rules on energy efficiency, but also trying to hide helpful tips and information for the public, and it’s going to cost people more money.”
The deleted webpages were filed under the department’s “energy saver” section and included a wide range of advice for energy and cost-saving measures, from ways to keep your home cool during the summer when energy bills and usage can spike to tips on how to “weatherstrip,” or seal air leaks, around the home.
More than 300 of the webpages had more than 160,000 page views in the last 30 days, according to a Guardian analysis of government web traffic data from the US General Services Administration.
Since the 1970s, the DOE’s appliance and equipment standards program has required manufacturers to update appliances every few years to keep their products in line with the latest technological advances.
The program has been “a real success story,” said deLaski from the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “The strain on our [electrical] grid is a lot lower than it would be, and people’s utility bills are a lot lower than they would be.”
An analysis from deLaski’s coalition found the next round of efficiency standard updates are estimated to save each household an average of $160 annually on utility bills and could significantly ease peak summer electricity demand, reducing pressure on an electrical grid already strained from AI datacenters and more frequent heatwaves.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has attempted to weaken energy efficiency standards. Last May, the energy department tried to repeal 47 regulations consisting mostly of energy efficiency standards for appliances. The administration also tried to end the popular Energy Star program, which certifies energy efficient appliances, but the effort was blocked by both congressional Democrats and Republicans earlier this year.
Critics say the webpage removals are one way the Trump administration is making the case for a broader campaign, outlined in Project 2025, to push through a slew of measures deregulating the fossil fuel industry and gutting the federal bureaucracy.
“It’s a senseless dedication to an anti-regulatory agenda driven by what I would say are anti-regulatory zealots,” deLaski said.
2026-07-17 11:07:14
On Thursday night, after days of buildup, Donald Trump delivered a speech on election security in which he suggested US elections were threatened by China. He repeatedly pointed to China and its purported efforts to hack voter and election data and to mount influence operations to foment anti-Trump sentiment. But he provided no proof of Chinese interference with US elections or of any voter fraud. And, perhaps more significantly, he left out a big piece of the picture: Russia.
As Trump assailed US elections as totally rigged and lacking credibility—again, without offering any evidence of this—he fixated on Beijing. The connection was not clear. He seemed to be saying that China has been involved in subverting US elections, including the 2020 contest that he lost and that he has falsely insisted (ad naseum) was stolen from him. He denounced the supposed Deep State for having “worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people.” In 2020, though, the major culprit in terms of election meddling was not China, but Moscow.
Who says so? Trump’s own intelligence community.
In August 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a brief statement assessing foreign efforts to influence the ongoing presidential election. It noted that the intelligence agencies had concluded that China and Iran favored Trump’s defeat. But the statement provided no details on what, if anything, China and Iran were doing to thwart Trump’s reelection.
As for Russia, the statement was more direct. It said Moscow was “using a range of measures to primarily denigrate” Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presidential candidate. It noted that a “pro-Russia” Ukrainian parliamentarian named Andriy Derkach “was spreading” false claims—alleging that Biden had engaged in corruption in Ukraine—to “undermine” his candidacy. It added, “Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television.”
Asked about this intelligence assessment at the time, Trump said, “I don’t care what anybody says.”
A month later, Trump’s Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach and called him “an active Russian agent for over a decade” and accused him of running an ongoing operation—by putting out bogus information about Biden—to discredit the Democrat. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared that “Derkach and other Russian agents” had employed “manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence” the US election.
Trump’s own administration was saying Moscow was actively interfering with the 2020 election.
Months after that contest, the US intelligence community released an assessment of “foreign threats” to the 2020 race. This is what it said about the Russian effort:
We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US. Unlike in 2016, we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure…A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence
narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.
The report also evaluated Beijing’s involvement in the 2020 election: “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.” It added, “We did not identify China attempting to interfere with election infrastructure or provide funding to any candidates or parties.”
That’s a big difference. Russia ran an extensive operation to help Trump. China did not do much, if anything.
Trump has long denied that Putin intervened in the 2016 campaign and helped him win the White House—though various investigations, including a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee inquiry and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation concluded the Kremlin covertly aided Trump. In this speech, Trump made China the bad guy, ignoring Russia’s interventions in US elections.
If Trump were serious about combatting foreign attempts to mess in US campaigns, he’d address Putin’s meddling. Yet that would never happen. This speech was meant to back up his unfounded and hysterical claim that US elections have been wracked with rampant fraud—which is why, in his deluded telling, he lost in 2020—and he sought to blame China for that. The real culprit, Russia, was MIA.
2026-07-17 06:30:00
The mothers of Black newborns are more likely than those of White newborns to be referred to law enforcement over allegations of substance use during pregnancy, according to The Marshall Project’s new analysis of child welfare data from eight states. The referrals are often the result of unreliable hospital drug tests performed at childbirth that are easily misinterpreted and produce false positive results as much as half of the time, which can prompt incorrect reporting to child welfare and law enforcement authorities.
Medical centers can report claims of pregnancy substance use to child welfare agencies, which can then refer the cases to law enforcement. Using birth rates in eight states, The Marshall Project estimated that Black babies are around two and a half times more likely than White babies to be flagged to law enforcement over claims of substance exposure in the womb. The analysis is the first to measure the overrepresentation of Black newborns among these referrals and the disproportionate impact they can have on Black families.
During a seven-year period, child welfare agencies across 20 states referred the parents of more than 25,000 Black newborns to police or prosecutors over alleged pregnancy substance use, The Marshall Project found. In eight of those states that had enough detailed data to compare estimated rates of referrals across Black and White children, all showed referrals were more common when the cases involved Black families.
Child welfare data on newborns of other races and ethnicities was not provided to The Marshall Project.
In Oklahoma, an estimated 1 in 11 Black babies were flagged to law enforcement over accusations of pregnancy substance use. In Minnesota, the families of Black newborns were estimated to be about three and a half times more likely than those of White newborns to be referred to police.
Child welfare agencies can refer allegations to police or prosecutors even when their investigations clear the parents or find no evidence that they posed an urgent threat. The Marshall Project found this occurred with a considerable number of Black families. In a seven-year period, more than 14,000 cases involving Black newborns were sent to law enforcement agencies in the eight states, even though child welfare authorities did not conclude that child abuse or neglect occurred.
The data does not spell out why cases against Black families are more common, but decades of research spanning the country has shown that racial disparities are embedded through every step of the child welfare process. Black women are more likely than White women to be drug tested at childbirth and reported to child welfare authorities, more likely to be investigated and more likely to be separated from their children, previous studies have found.
The data also does not specify what happens after cases are referred to law enforcement. Many of these reports are filed away without consequence. But other mothers have been shamed, surveilled, arrested, jailed, prosecuted and left with enduring trauma.
The referrals to police likely contribute to higher rates of depression and stress among Black postpartum women, exacerbating the Black maternal mortality crisis, said Miriam Mack, senior legal counsel at the advocacy group Movement for Family Power.
“It’s not about what you do, what substances you use, how much you’re using, whether you’re using, but it’s about who you are,” Mack said. “It’s about the simple fact that you are Black and you have given birth in the hospital.”
The Marshall Project has previously documented the harms to Black mothers who are drug tested during childbirth. Ayanna Harris-Rashid was arrested in South Carolina in 2021 after testing positive due to legal CBD gummies and a topical hemp-based ointment she took during her pregnancy. Amid the stress of criminal charges and incarceration, she lost the ability to breastfeed her newborn son.
Melissa Robinson, a Black elementary school librarian in Alabama, was investigated in 2024 after she had a false positive test for cocaine. The hospital barred Robinson from breastfeeding and child welfare officials told her she could not be alone with her baby, even though a second hospital drug test disproved the allegation against her. The case was ultimately closed due to insufficient evidence.
“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult,” Robinson told The Marshall Project in 2024. “Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.”
To conduct the analysis, The Marshall Project obtained seven years of data, stretching between mid-2018 and mid-2024, from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, which stores the information from state child welfare agencies. The eight states with more detailed numbers on newborn race and referrals were California, Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas.
Child welfare officials in the eight states were allowed to review the findings. In Oklahoma, officials called the analysis “misleading and inaccurate” because it excludes children who have a multiracial parent if the other parent is not Black or White, which could overestimate how often law enforcement referrals take place. The Marshall Project conducted a subsequent analysis and found that the overrepresentation of Black newborns was consistent in the data whether the children of multiracial parents were Black, White or neither. Read more about the methodology here.
Seven of the states included in the analysis have policies requiring child welfare to automatically share cases of pregnancy substance use with law enforcement, even if the allegations are unfounded.
When child welfare workers review a claim of drug exposure in the womb, they may investigate and find no evidence of child abuse or neglect, or decide the risk to the child is low enough to offer support services rather than conduct an investigation. Even so, the agency can be required to share these allegations with law enforcement, potentially leading to unnecessary surveillance, arrest or prosecution. Those referrals typically occur before child welfare has completed its reviews of the cases.
For the eight states in the analysis, among families referred to law enforcement, child welfare agencies were 25% more likely to dismiss or divert pregnancy substance use allegations made against Black families compared to White families. The difference was especially stark in Kentucky, where child welfare workers were 38% more likely to close a case without a finding of abuse or neglect when the newborn was Black. The findings suggest that Black parents are more likely to be reported to authorities over substance use claims that are unfounded or pose a low safety risk to their children.
The Marshall Project interviewed more than a dozen doctors, researchers and parent advocates to understand why Black newborns were overrepresented in the data. Most pointed to the fact that hospitals disproportionately drug test and report Black mothers and babies. Racial bias and poverty also play a role, with providers more likely to report someone that they perceive as lacking financial or social support, even if the parents may be competent and caring, doctors said.
Another reason may stem from changes in state and federal policies. Drug testing of pregnant women began in the 1980s during the crack epidemic, when fears of “crack babies” spurred state laws classifying substance use during pregnancy as child abuse or neglect. During the opioid epidemic in the early 2000s, hospital drug testing policies expanded again, with Congress directing states to identify all newborns “affected by” substance use, whether illegal or not. As a result, more parents are now reported to child welfare over positive tests triggered by legal substances, including prescribed medications, over-the-counter products and marijuana.
Two cases from a single hospital near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, show how a positive drug test for marijuana can produce vastly different outcomes.
When a Black mom and her newborn at Tidelands Waccamaw Community Hospital tested positive for THC in July of 2024, the hospital reported her to the state Department of Social Services, which referred her to law enforcement, Georgetown County Sheriff’s records show. A positive THC test can be triggered by legal substances, such as a CBD gummy. The documents do not indicate that officers interviewed the mother or attempted to identify the cause of the positive test before arresting her days later on a charge of child abuse.
Two months later, a White woman giving birth tested positive at the same hospital for the same substance. This time, however, a child welfare investigator told police the agency did not want to press charges. The patient had told the investigator that she tested positive because of a single CBD edible she had purchased at a store. The child welfare agency “believes the offender is not a threat to the victim,” the police report said. Police did not arrest the mother.
The community hospital and Sheriff’s department did not respond to requests for comment about the two cases. The South Carolina Department of Social Services declined to comment.
Marijuana testing floods the system with families who are not likely to harm their children, said Joseph Ryan, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan. He co-authored a study that found that the parents of Black newborns were more likely to be reported to child welfare over positive marijuana tests but rarely went on to commit child abuse or neglect.
“There’s really no reason to be testing for THC,” Ryan said. Though he said alcohol has far more detrimental effects on a developing fetus than marijuana, hospitals rarely screen for it. Reducing testing and reporting of marijuana would lessen the disproportionate number of Black families getting reported into the system, he said.
Attorneys and advocates for parents said the data may also obscure the reality of many cases that end up dismissed or that go through a process known as “alternative response.” During a child welfare investigation or assessment, parents may be asked to submit to drug tests and home inspections, to turn over their children to other caregivers or to agree to complete what are considered voluntary services in exchange for avoiding a formal child abuse or neglect case. These agreements can come with an implicit or explicit threat — if parents do not sign, child welfare may open an investigation or petition a judge to remove their child anyway. Many parents quickly agree, often without a lawyer present.
In Kentucky, such agreements are common and can lead to weeks or months of surveillance or separation, said civil rights attorney Paul Hill, who has represented people who signed prevention plans under threat of their children being sent to foster care. One of Hill’s clients was required to be supervised by her husband after testing positive at her child’s birth due to poppy seeds, according to court records.
A spokesperson for Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services said the agency has seen “firsthand the positive impact that prevention plans play in supporting families and kids across our commonwealth” and welcomes feedback on each case.
Even cases that are eventually dismissed cause distress during a crucial bonding time and open the door to further intervention, advocates said.
Mothers can find themselves subject to new child welfare cases later on in their children’s lives if they struggle with their mental health or have trouble paying bills. Child welfare or police reports documenting the original substance use allegations from childbirth could be cited as evidence, even if the claims were unfounded. The hospital reports also erode trust between providers and patients, leading many parents to avoid medical care altogether.
For Brittany Pettway, a Black mom in Kentucky, the experience of being drug tested and reported on two separate occasions after she gave birth has made her scared to have another child.
“I think race does play a big part in it,” she said. “It just seems like they already think we’re unfit and unstable.”
All of this worsens health outcomes, experts say. The stress of an investigation, even one ultimately closed, can trigger relapse into substance use or otherwise harm the health of the mother or infant — in a healthcare landscape in which Black women are already at higher risk of death.
“The sheer fear of living with being investigated by the police, of living with being investigated by CPS — that in and of itself is the harm,” said Mack, the attorney at Movement for Family Power. “The impact that that has on a person’s body, a person’s health, a person’s well-being, that’s the harm.”
For many advocates and doctors, the solutions are clear. Leading medical groups advise against routine drug testing of pregnant women. Such tests do not prove that someone has an addiction and are often conducted without a patient’s knowledge or consent.
Earlier this year, following The Marshall Project’s reporting, the state of New Jersey began requiring hospitals to confirm drug screens with more precise tests prior to sharing results with child welfare authorities. The state also instructed providers to obtain informed consent before drug testing pregnant patients and confirmed that a positive result alone does not constitute child abuse or neglect. The state now has an anonymized form for hospitals to share information about substance-affected infants without triggering a child welfare investigation.
Instead of funding the punishment of women through costly child welfare or criminal cases, advocates said officials should fund family support services, such as drug treatment programs that offer childcare and food assistance.
“These places, they’re not invested in Black parenting. They’re not even invested in Black motherhood survival,” said Erin Miles Cloud, a civil rights attorney who has represented mothers with child welfare cases. Cloud said the default response to these structural problems has become punishment. “We should all be worried about a system that is set up to divert people to the police.”
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, Reveal and CBS News.
