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On Saturday, the night before Election Day in Hungary, I had dinner in Budapest with a political philosopher named Zoltán Miklósi. “Rationally, I can see all the signs that the opposition is gaining ground, and I don’t see a way for Orbán to overcome it,” he said. “But, I have to confess, when I try to think of Orbán simply losing and walking away, I can’t quite imagine it.” Dozens of Hungarians had told me much the same thing. Viktor Orbán, the longest-serving Prime Minister in the European Union, had been in office since 2010, pioneering a system of legalized autocracy that became a model for aspiring strongmen all over the world, including President Donald Trump. In the past three years, though, the Hungarian economy faltered, and what was left of its independent media focussed relentlessly on the corruption and rot in the Orbán regime. Péter Magyar, a former official in Orbán’s party, became an ascendant opposition candidate, drawing unprecedented crowds at rallies across the country and eventually leading in most polls. Business élites started to signal dissatisfaction with Orbán. Whistle-blowers emerged from the military and the police. Orbán’s grip on power, unquestionable for a decade and a half, suddenly looked vulnerable. (Even he seemed to know it: at a joint press conference with Vice-President J. D. Vance, who’d come to Hungary to stump for him, Vance said, “Viktor Orbán is going to win the next election,” and Orbán made a tentative so-so hand gesture that immediately became a meme.)

Every Hungarian I spoke with could recite these facts, but still, on the eve of the election, no one seemed able to internalize them. In the previous election, the opposition had stirred up hope, only to endure a crushing defeat. Surely Orbán would find a way to triumph once again, even if no one could anticipate how. “I have friends who are worried about some sort of legal trickery, or last-minute intervention by the Russians,” Miklósi told me. “Others are worried about violence.” The only scenario that seemed impossible to contemplate was a clear win for Magyar, a quick concession from Orbán, and a moment of national catharsis.

The first time I interviewed Miklósi, last year, I asked him whether the U.S. was sleepwalking down the trail that Hungary had blazed a decade earlier, and, if so, whether American exceptionalism might make this harder for us to see. He validated this concern, but he also raised an inverse problem—not an exceptionalism that insists that a descent into authoritarianism is impossible, but a defeatism suggesting that, once authoritarianism takes hold, there’s no way out. “It’s understandable, after so many years of setbacks and humiliations, but it’s one of the biggest dangers, because it deprives you of political agency,” Miklosi told me. “Defeatism breeds defeat.”

The key fact about the autocratic regime that Orbán engineered in Hungary—the very thing that made it a useful prototype for Trump and other elected autocrats—is that it was a form of competitive authoritarianism, not totalitarianism. Orbán had used a supermajority in Parliament to rewrite the constitution, consolidating his power and tilting key institutions toward his interests. Still, Hungary was not North Korea, or Egypt, or Azerbaijan; it was more like India, or Turkey, or the United States. Elections were held every four years, and these elections remained competitive. Orbán used the tools of autocratic legalism (extreme gerrymandering, courts stacked with loyalists) to tilt the system in his favor, but he never cancelled elections, or ordered the police to shoot at protesters, or conjured votes out of thin air. Miklósi, in a recent journal article called “Perversity, futility, complicity: Should democrats participate in autocratic elections?,” considers a range of philosophical arguments against voting in a “normatively illegitimate” regime. And yet he keeps warning readers, and perhaps himself, against defeatism: “The outcome of autocratic elections, despite the immense advantages of the ruling party, is not entirely predetermined. Electoral autocracies are unique among autocracies in that their ruling party can, though rarely, be defeated by an opposition that plays within the autocrat’s own formal rules of the game.”

On Sunday, what the Hungarians got was precisely what they’d found hardest to imagine. Magyar won a clear majority, enough for his party to secure a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament. At around 10 P.M., Orbán called Magyar to concede; after that, the streets of Budapest erupted in what can only be described as catharsis. “We don’t do Carnival here, but this is our Hungarian Carnival,” Ákos Takács, an architect and a former progressive activist, said (or, really, shouted), passing around cups of champagne in a square in downtown Budapest. All around us, grown men hugged and cried; young parents hoisted children on their shoulders; a few police officers stood on a street corner, chatting amiably with passersby. One of Takács’s friends, speaking English for my benefit, kept shouting “Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck!” (“I have Tourette’s, but in the happy way,” she hastened to explain, unnecessarily.) People waved Hungarian flags and erupted in patriotic chants. “In this hip, lefty part of the city, you wouldn’t see this sort of patriotism, ever, except at this moment,” Takács said.

Péter Magyar may now be a global icon of democratic resistance, but, as the revellers on the square were well aware, he is no progressive hero. In some ways, he ran to Orbán’s left, voicing broad support for the E.U. and antipathy toward Vladimir Putin; in other ways, he sounded like as much of a right-wing hard-liner as Orbán did, maintaining a number of socially conservative positions and, in the final months of the campaign, insinuating that Filipino immigrants were eating the ducks in the Budapest Zoo. For the most part, he ran as a Hungarian Everyman, dodging divisive policy questions and preferring to speak about the most universal issues in the broadest possible terms: rooting out corruption, restoring power to the people. This was, of course, an astute political strategy. It also makes him something of a cipher. He has the square jaw and coiffed blond hair of an action figure. Magyar, in Hungarian, means “Hungarian.” (Imagine a strapping guy named Joe America, running as the nominee of the Freedom and Grilled-Meat Party, and you won’t be too far off.)

Even under competitive authoritarianism, politics is still politics. Viktor Orbán was a politician—a ruthless, cunning one, unusually capable of bending and breaking the rules of liberal democracy—but not, in the end, an invincible superhero. He did what he could to lock in his power, but he couldn’t manufacture popular support simply by willing it into existence. (Neither, it’s worth reminding ourselves, can Donald Trump.) Orbán’s party will have a supermajority in Parliament for a few more weeks, and some analysts worry that this leaves room for mischief. But Magyar, in his victory speech on the banks of the Danube River, reiterated that “those who have robbed the country will be held accountable.” In the closing days of his campaign, Magyar pledged that, even if he won a two-thirds majority, he would not use it to rewrite the constitution unilaterally, as Orbán did sixteen years ago. For now, we’ll have to take his word for it. ♦

On any given day, roughly three million tractor-trailers ferry goods along American highways, and it is only because of some perverse collective disavowal that any of us, in our dinky cars, agree to share the road with them. Large trucks account for five per cent of the vehicles in the United States but play a role in ten per cent of fatal accidents. A fully loaded eighteen-wheeler can weigh eighty thousand pounds. It takes time for such vehicles to accelerate to highway speeds, but, by the same physics, once they’ve achieved such velocity it takes time for them to stop. A big rig thundering along a freeway at sixty-five miles per hour is a juggernaut: even if the driver slams the brakes, the truck will advance the length of two football fields before finally coming to a halt.

In America, more than five thousand people are killed each year in accidents involving large trucks, and the victims tend to be occupants of smaller vehicles. A sedan or an S.U.V.—even a school bus—is no match for the magnitude of an eighteen-wheeler. Witnesses and survivors of such accidents have likened the sound of impact to a bomb blast. When a car rear-ends a tractor-trailer, it can result in a grisly scenario known as “underride,” in which the lower half of the car wedges beneath the trailer while the upper half is sheared away or mangled. Sometimes, in the vivid language of accident investigators, the crash can make a car “telescope,” or crumple like a beer can. In 1967, the actress Jayne Mansfield perished when a Buick she was riding in crashed into a tractor-trailer; afterward, rear-impact guards—colloquially known as Mansfield bars—became a standard feature on the back of trucks. This reduced, but did not eliminate, underride fatalities. In most of Europe, similar barriers line the sides of cargo trailers, preventing cars from sliding laterally beneath a big rig. But in the U.S. the trucking industry has resisted the introduction of such additional safeguards, citing cost.

People get dismembered in accidents with tractor-trailers. In some crashes, a car is flattened so thoroughly that emergency workers cannot immediately tell how many bodies it contains. In 2009, in Oklahoma, a tractor-trailer failed to slow for traffic and crushed a Hyundai Sonata and a Kia Spectra. Ten people died. In 2023, a man named Danny Glen Tiner was driving an eighteen-wheeler at sixty-eight miles an hour on a highway near Chandler, Arizona, when he became distracted by a TikTok video on his phone and plowed into stopped traffic, killing five. (He pleaded guilty to negligent homicide and was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison.) In the milliseconds before a collision, truck drivers are often powerless to avert disaster. Having activated the brakes but unable to stop, they brace for impact. Sometimes they close their eyes.

A 2003 federal law mandates that truckers cannot drive their routes for more than eleven hours a day, to maintain alertness, and today’s large trucks are so computerized that they operate almost like airplanes, correcting for human shortcomings. Most accidents involving big rigs aren’t fatal. But there are a lot of them—half a million or so each year—and they adhere to certain actuarial probabilities. Large-truck crashes tend to happen on weekdays, often at night. You might suppose that there’d be more fatal accidents in densely populated regions, but the opposite is true: drivers are most apt to speed recklessly, or succumb to fatigue, on freight corridors that run through rural areas.

About a decade ago, however, the city of New Orleans began experiencing accidents involving eighteen-wheelers with a frequency that was anomalous—and alarming. The sudden spike in big-rig collisions occurred in just one area: a fourteen-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that runs through a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city known as New Orleans East. Starting around 2015, scores of accidents involving tractor-trailers and passenger cars were reported in the area each year, often resulting in damage to the cars and medical care for occupants who reported injuries. In 2004, there were sixty-nine sideswipe accidents in New Orleans in which a passenger vehicle collided with a large truck. By 2017, the annual number had nearly tripled. When insurance adjusters examined the roadway where the crashes were happening, there were no obvious hazards—like faulty lighting or an especially steep grade—that could account for this newfound profusion. For truckers, that stretch of New Orleans East had become an asphalt Bermuda Triangle—a treacherous gantlet best avoided.

Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan

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Another confounding feature of the crashes was that, in virtually all of them, the cars contained multiple occupants. For years, the typical number of passengers in a car wreck in Louisiana had been consistent, averaging 1.4. But, when the frequency of accidents involving large trucks started to climb in New Orleans, so, too, did the number of occupants. Suddenly, it became typical for at least three people to be in a car at the time of a collision. When Helmut Schneider, a business professor at Louisiana State University, calculated the likelihood of such a rise in accidents involving so many people taking place in such a contained geographic area, he determined that the odds of this all happening by chance were one in seven hundred and fifty trillion.

One afternoon in May, 2017, a driver named Lee Mulligan was transporting a trailer full of Walmart products from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to Harvey, Louisiana. Mulligan, fifty-three and ruddy, had been driving professionally since 1985. Like fighter pilots, truck drivers sometimes adopt a handle, to identify themselves on CB radio. Mulligan’s was Stagger Lee. At sunup that morning, he’d done a full vehicle inspection, checking the lights, brakes, mirrors, wipers. It was a brand-new truck, with everything in good condition.

Traffic was relatively light that day, and Mulligan was driving west in the left lane of I-10, near Exit 241. He wanted to move into the center lane, but, as he later explained, when your vehicle is sixty feet long, changing lanes is “a process.” Activating his turn signal, Mulligan checked the mirror on the right side of his cab and noticed a blue Nissan Altima in the middle lane, close enough that it would be risky to pull ahead of it. So he clicked off the turn signal and waited. When the Nissan dropped back, Mulligan signalled once more.

“I eased in,” he said. But, as he gently maneuvered rightward, he checked the mirror again and was startled to see the Nissan reappear, right on his tail. The truck was so big and the car so small that when they collided Mulligan didn’t feel a thing. But in the mirror he saw the front of the Nissan smashing into the right flank of his trailer.

The scheme worked, in part, because New Orleans is what tort-reform advocates have called a “judicial hellhole”—a plaintiff-friendly arena where jurors tend to be sympathetic toward working-class locals and happy to slap a jumbo penalty on a faceless corporation.Illustrations by Thomas Merceron

Even glancing contact between a passenger car and a semi truck is often enough to send the smaller vehicle pinwheeling across the highway. But in this case Mulligan was lucky: the driver of the Nissan maintained control. When it was safe to pull onto the shoulder, Mulligan did so, and the Nissan followed. A diminutive forty-nine-year-old Black woman, Demetra Henderson-Burkhalter, got out. Her clothes were wet; in the impact, she’d lost control of her bladder. She had two passengers with her, a man named Gregory Offray and a woman named Jacqueline Thompson. A passing driver stopped and reported that he had witnessed the accident.

Someone from the sheriff’s office arrived, and they all moved to the parking lot of an abandoned Holiday Inn, which had stood derelict since Hurricane Katrina, more than a decade earlier. Mulligan took photographs of the damage to the Nissan: ugly scrapes lined the driver’s side, and the rearview mirror on that side had been ripped off. But, as he later explained in a deposition, something seemed amiss. It wasn’t just that the Nissan hadn’t fallen back when Mulligan began changing lanes; the driver had seemed to accelerate as he was trying to enter the center lane, causing the crash. As he testified, “I believe she gassed it and came up and hit me.”

The idea that anyone not afflicted by a death wish might initiate a high-speed accident with a thirty-eight-ton tractor-trailer seemed ludicrous. Two occupants of the Nissan reported serious injuries; a subsequent lawsuit against Mulligan and Walmart stated that, when Mulligan had slid “suddenly and without warning” into the car’s path, Henderson-Burkhalter and Thompson had been badly hurt, to the point that both underwent spinal surgery. Their suit cited “severe physical pain and suffering as well as keen emotional anguish.” The witness to the crash agreed that Mulligan had driven recklessly.

In preparation for the lawsuit, the defendants hired a consultant named Wayne Winkler, a former Louisiana state trooper who now worked as an accident reconstructionist. Winkler had studied thousands of wrecks. When he examined this one, he found that it shared striking similarities with many other crashes in New Orleans East during the previous eighteen months. All of them involved a car sideswiping the back of a tractor-trailer that was making a lane change. In many cases, a witness in another car had flagged the truck driver down. There were invariably multiple people in the damaged car, who subsequently claimed injuries and commenced litigation. Winkler identified at least sixty-four recent incidents that fit this general description.

Attorneys for the defendants began investigating, and learned that one of the passengers in the car, Jacqueline Thompson, was a member of the Harris family, a sprawling New Orleans clan comprising dozens of relatives. It turned out that many Harrises had been plaintiffs in personal-injury cases involving crashes with tractor-trailers. A man named Ryan Harris—who went by Red and owned Networth Motors, an auto-body shop just off I-10—had been in phone contact with numerous family members and other individuals who ended up filing truck-collision lawsuits. And just a month before Mulligan’s accident there had been a crash on I-10 in which a truck collided with a Lincoln Town Car carrying Harris’s aunt, along with her husband, her blind brother, and her teen-aged granddaughter.

Demetra Henderson-Burkhalter, meanwhile, had also exchanged many calls with a New Orleans man named Cornelius Garrison III, who had been a plaintiff in a lawsuit arising from a truck collision in 2015 and had been listed as a witness to another collision in 2014. Around the time of Henderson-Burkhalter’s accident with Mulligan, she had spoken with Garrison on nearly thirty occasions, including on two calls in the hours before the collision, three calls right around the time of the crash, and seven calls later that day. Garrison had also communicated with Red Harris, other members of the Harris family, and numerous other people who had crashed into big rigs. As a lawyer who examined these records subsequently wrote, Garrison appeared to be “the link between the plaintiffs in all of these incidents.”

The roads of New Orleans are cluttered with serried ranks of billboards touting the services of personal-injury lawyers. Watch a single episode of the “Today” show on the local NBC affiliate and you might encounter twenty different commercials for such attorneys. Chief among them is Morris Bart, who pioneered this kind of blanket advertising in Louisiana in the nineteen-eighties, and is so ubiquitous that many locals can recite his tagline: “One call, that’s all.” Bart argues that such promotion has a salutary social function, reaching people in underserved communities who might not otherwise be aware that they are entitled to aggressive, contingency-fee advocacy. But, really, this is a volume business. Firms take on vast numbers of cases, generally aiming to settle with insurance companies rather than go to trial. (Detractors contend that this might be the actual meaning of “One call, that’s all.”) And the competition is cutthroat. Bart claims to have recovered more than a billion dollars for his clients, but downstream of him are scores of challengers angling to catch some of that action for themselves. “It’s like ‘The Hunger Games,’ ” a local lawyer told me.

A few years ago, Bart sued a lawyer named Brad Egenberg, claiming that Egenberg had made ad purchases on Google to steer users searching for “Morris Bart” or “One call, that’s all” to his own firm’s website. The number of bodily-injury claims stemming from auto accidents in Louisiana is twice the national average. For attorneys in an overcrowded marketplace, in a city with casual ethics and a weakness for flamboyance, an outlandish sales pitch can be the best way to break through. Egenberg is a braggadocious impresario who features in dozens of ads, sporting big sunglasses and sometimes a fur coat and generally carrying on like the stimulant-addled lawyer played by Sean Penn in “Carlito’s Way.” Egenberg refers to himself as “His Bradjesty,” and has a catchphrase of his own: “Greedy for Ju$tice.” When we spoke recently, Egenberg asked if I had seen his TV spots, and I ventured that they were somewhat over the top. “I get a lot of phone calls,” he said, with punchy assurance. “What do you want me to do, stand there in a suit?”

Cartoon by Roz Chast

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt once described a “pettifogger”—an unscrupulous, bottom-feeding attorney—as “a man who is small, mean and tricky, and picayune.” New Orleans has long been notorious for embracing such scoundrels, a reputation that isn’t exactly helped by the fact that, for many years, disgraced attorneys who lost their licenses in Louisiana and applied for readmission to the bar often got it. One lawyer of particular infamy, who stole from clients and ended up going to prison, had to be disbarred three times before he finally gave up. As a local columnist once remarked, Louisiana exhibits “a kindheartedness towards sleazy attorneys that lay thieves might envy.”

For decades, New Orleans personal-injury lawyers have relied on an informal army of “runners” to bring them fresh cases. Though technically illegal, this mode of direct solicitation has grown into its own ancillary industry: runners are not lawyers but well-connected hustlers who monitor police scanners and know people at towing companies. They often swarm after a car crash, plucking future plaintiffs from the wreckage and shepherding them to law offices downtown. (Somebody’s got to chase the ambulance.) In the nineteen-nineties, a group of attorneys known as the Canal Street Cartel, for the thoroughfare bordering the French Quarter where they maintained offices, were indicted for operating a huge network of runners and paying bounties as high as five hundred dollars for each client they brought in the door.

Cornelius Garrison—the purported link to many of the car-crash cases—worked as a runner. Genial, slender, and very tall, he was born in 1966, and grew up in a housing project in the Upper Ninth Ward. He was known to many as Slim. Garrison had two adult sons and three grandchildren, but also a baby girl from a more recent relationship. Over the years, he had held various jobs, from working the fry station at a Ruth’s Chris Steak House to polishing the floors at tourist hotels. Although he’d been arrested several times, for writing bad checks and other minor offenses, he had generally maintained a low profile, and still lived with his mother. He kept his hair in a neat high-top fade, got his nails manicured, and drove a cream Cadillac Escalade.

Insurance scams involving deliberate auto collisions have a long history. Two decades ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an advisory about “Staged Auto Accident Fraud,” warning of daredevils in cars “crammed full of passengers” who braked abruptly, causing the vehicle behind to rear-end them, then filed bogus claims about soft-tissue injuries, which were “difficult for doctors to confirm.” Attempting such a stunt with an eighteen-wheeler, however, marked a dramatic—and potentially suicidal—escalation. But if the risks were vast, so were the potential rewards. Whereas insurance coverage on the average passenger car might be as low as fifteen thousand dollars per bodily injury, tractor-trailers often carry policies worth at least a million dollars, offering the prospect of a much bigger payout.

Smashing into a speeding truck is obviously dangerous, but the fraudsters sought to mitigate the chance of fatalities by appointing designated drivers who were skillful enough to hit a truck with sufficient force to cause damage to their own car—but not so much that they would end up getting flattened. Such drivers came to be known, in the vernacular of this criminal ecosystem, as “slammers.” In New Orleans, one of the earliest slammers was a jovial fellow named Damian Labeaud, who, starting in 2010, recruited passengers from the local community with the promise of insurance payouts, then took them hunting on the freeway for a truck.

“Watching and seeing, that’s the only training I had,” Labeaud subsequently recalled. “You got to know how an eighteen-wheeler move.” You must also drive with utmost precision, he pointed out, so that “you don’t get killed.” (Labeaud has pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in staging accidents, and is currently awaiting sentencing.) As a slammer, he worked closely with crooked lawyers, communicating in a rudimentary code. “I’m about to go fishing,” he’d tell them. “Want me to bring you some lunch?”

Garrison learned the business from a pioneering slammer named Jeffrey Derouselle. In 2009, Derouselle was involved in an accident in which a Ford Explorer he was driving collided with an eighteen-wheeler. One of the passengers in the car was Garrison’s older son. By 2015, Garrison and Derouselle were working together as slammers, collaborating with a lawyer named Jason Giles, who was a partner at a prominent Canal Street personal-injury outfit, the King Firm. According to court documents, Giles directed Garrison and Derouselle to bring him twenty-five cases a month, promising to pay them thirteen hundred dollars for each passenger they enlisted.

It was surprisingly easy to find locals willing to risk their lives for money. Nearly a quarter of New Orleans residents live in poverty, and the prospect of a substantial windfall for a few hours’ work apparently outweighed any fear of getting into a car that was about to take part in a high-speed accident. Besides, the involvement of lawyers, with their downtown office suites, perfumed the whole arrangement with an aroma of respectability.

In poor, predominantly Black neighborhoods, Garrison developed a reputation as a man to see if you had financial difficulties. “Talk to Slim,” locals would advise friends who needed money. “He can help you out.” Entire families signed up to ride with the slammers. People packed into cars with their aging relatives and their preteen children. At least one of the passengers was pregnant.

Garrison turned out to be a preternaturally coolheaded driver. If he were to misjudge the point of impact by even a few millimetres, or to exert a little too much pressure on the gas pedal while accelerating into a collision, the car could easily spin out or, worse, underride the trailer, decapitating everyone in the vehicle. “Your car running good?” he would ask his passengers, who generally supplied their own automobiles for the staged accidents. Like a seasoned getaway driver, Garrison wanted to know about a heavy gas pedal or a squishy brake—any quirk that might have fatal consequences.

“He ain’t talk too much,” a former passenger said of Garrison, describing how focussed the slammer became when scanning a highway for a promising target. When Garrison found an eighteen-wheeler, he’d stalk it from a distance, like a lion trailing a wildebeest, until the truck signalled a lane change. Then he’d speed up. “ ‘We’re gonna hit it,’ ” the former passenger recalled him saying. “And then . . . bam.”

Garrison typically coördinated with a second car—a so-called “spotter”—because it was helpful to have an ostensibly neutral bystander who could say that he’d witnessed the accident. After sideswiping a tractor-trailer, Garrison would pull over while the spotter sped ahead to flag down the truck’s driver. Meanwhile, Garrison would scramble out of the driver’s seat, allowing one of his passengers to get behind the wheel. Because the goal of the conspiracy was to file lawsuits, Garrison could not be named as the driver in too many accidents—that could expose the whole scheme. Instead, he would simply walk away from the crash. Often, the spotter car would pick him up and follow the truck while the slammer car stayed behind, allowing Garrison to pretend to have witnessed the very accident he’d just caused.

“There’s a driving range around here somewhere.”

Cartoon by Frank Cotham

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In the course of several years, Garrison staged scores of truck crashes. Miraculously, although some of his passengers may have sustained mild injuries, not a single one was maimed or killed. Garrison himself occasionally complained of aches and pains that he attributed to the many impacts. Juanisha Winchester, a woman he dated after becoming a slammer, recalled, “He didn’t say what he did. He told me to stay out of his business, basically.” But she came to understand that Garrison “did accidents” for a living.

“I’m going to handle my business,” he’d tell Winchester before heading off in search of a truck to collide with. Sometimes, when he came home, she would pick fragments of broken glass out of his hair.

In May, 2016, the slammer who had taught Garrison, Jeffrey Derouselle, was shot to death, apparently over an unrelated matter. As Garrison later explained, he did not want to “deal with middlemen anymore,” so he pivoted away from the King Firm and forged a partnership with a young attorney who had only just graduated from law school. Her name was Vanessa Motta.

Growing up, Motta had trained as a dancer, and as an adult she retained the broad-shouldered physicality and ferocious competitive instincts of a serious athlete. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, she spent her childhood in Florida and then attended Chapman University, in Orange, California, before working as a stunt double in Hollywood for several years. She appeared in fight scenes and chase sequences in dozens of movies and television shows, including “Sons of Anarchy” and “The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning.” Motta is tall and long-limbed, with a small, round face, an olive complexion, and brown hair that whips about theatrically when she is kicking ass. At the 2010 Taurus World Stunt Awards, she was nominated in the Best Fire category for her work on a reboot of “Friday the 13th.” Motta became romantically involved with another stunt professional, Jeff Brockton, who is credited in hundreds of productions, from “Speed 2: Cruise Control” to “Sinners.” The couple had a daughter in 2010, and named her Julia, for Julia Roberts.

During Motta’s years as a stuntwoman, Louisiana was becoming a major hub for film production, because it offered significant tax incentives to studios. (“Hollywood South, baby!” Ray Nagin, then New Orleans’s mayor, proclaimed in 2005.) Like many below-the-line Hollywood professionals, Motta and Brockton opted to relocate, buying a home in Slidell, on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain, in 2011. But their relationship didn’t last, and the movie studios moved on, lured away by new incentives in other states. Julia had been born with a kidney disease, which would eventually necessitate a transplant. Motta, perhaps recognizing that she couldn’t rely on stunt work forever, enrolled in law school at Loyola University New Orleans. She passed the bar in 2016, and joined a personal-injury firm. But, after falling out with her boss, she was fired, and, with a mere seven months of legal experience, she struck out on her own.

Motta moved her fledgling practice, Motta Law, into a small office building at 525 Clay Street, in Kenner, just west of New Orleans. A modest beige-brick structure that housed several other law offices, it occupied an inauspicious location abutting a railroad track. The landlord was a local man named Sean Alfortish. Rawboned and muscular, he had a macho affability. At forty-nine, he was fourteen years older than Motta, but they began dating almost immediately—and, soon enough, got engaged. Alfortish worked for a “medical factoring” company, which financed treatment for people who had been injured in accidents and collected money from their settlements. Motta was looking for accident cases in order to build Motta Law. Her new boyfriend introduced her to Cornelius Garrison.

The whole staged-accident conspiracy required a close relationship between slammers and attorneys. Alfortish had worked as a lawyer himself. His e-mail address was [email protected], and when Garrison first met him he got the impression that Alfortish was still a practicing attorney. The truth was more colorful. Alfortish had been disbarred after pleading guilty, in 2011, to a conspiracy charge relating to his tenure as the president of a nonprofit, the Louisiana Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association, which advocates on behalf of professionals in the horse-racing business. In that role, he had been “a showman,” one association member told me, strutting around tracks with a racecard sticking out of his back pocket. One press account described him as “the peacock of the paddock.” But a financial audit revealed that Alfortish had been skimming money, some of which had been earmarked for hurricane relief, to pay for vacations to Aruba and to Grand Cayman, and for a new sound system at his home. He was also found to have clinched his second term as president through a ballot-rigging scheme.

“Ever since I was a kid, I took up for people who couldn’t fight for themselves,” Alfortish proclaimed at his sentencing, unwilling to let the contrition he was supposed to be expressing entirely drown out his self-regard. The judge, unmoved, observed that some people commit crimes because they’ve been “kicked around by society,” but that Alfortish—with his law degree—was not such a person. “Society has a right to expect more from you,” the judge said.

Alfortish served more than two years in prison before returning, quite unreformed, to New Orleans. According to authorities, he soon started working with Garrison to stage accidents. Although by this point Garrison had already been plying the slammer trade for several years, Alfortish wasn’t shy about offering him tactical advice. Garrison would later recall, for example, that Alfortish had cautioned him to limit the number of passengers to three, because four might raise “red flags.” Alfortish, who is white, tended to code-switch with Garrison, slipping into a Black American vernacular, and when referring to the passengers who rode in the slammers’ cars he drew on his equestrian past, calling them “horses.” According to Garrison, Alfortish sometimes recruited passengers himself. And, through the medical-factoring company, he lined up financing for post-accident procedures.

Motta’s role in the scheme was to initiate lawsuits against trucking and insurance companies in accident cases brought to her by Alfortish and Garrison. Her paperwork was sloppy—her court filings were riddled with typos—but she compensated with performative dudgeon. “A commercial driver is not a normal driver,” she would tell a jury. She said that her many clients were “like family,” and tended to speak to people in a register of exaggerated familiarity, calling them “my love” and touching their arm or shoulder. Motta took on dozens of cases involving crashes with large trucks, many of them linked to Garrison, and she was soon earning sums that were improbable for a newly minted law graduate. In 2018, Alfortish and Motta bought a home for $1.25 million on a cul-de-sac in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. According to later testimony by Motta’s accountant, her annual income abruptly “jumped into the millions” after she started handling large-truck accidents.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Motta, as a personal-injury attorney looking to make a mark in New Orleans, would star in a TV commercial. “Stuntwoman turned badass attorney,” a gravelly voiced announcer intoned over clips of Motta brawling in movies. “She knows . . . how to make them pay.” Motta started using her own slogan: “Send ’er in.” She even put up a billboard. It featured an image of her karate-kicking a truck.

In collaboration with personal-injury lawyers, some residents not only got themselves into dangerous accidents; they underwent unnecessary surgeries in order to increase the potential payoff.

Alfortish paid Garrison for his work as a slammer by check. At first, Garrison would simply cash the checks, but before long he was making so much money that he opened a bank account. Alfortish told Garrison that, if anyone ever questioned him about the origin of these funds, he should adopt a cover story about earning the money through construction jobs. Garrison started staging truck accidents with such frequency that it was hard for Motta to keep up with the caseload. One Christmas, Alfortish surprised Garrison with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus.

Garrison was generous with his money, doling out a hundred dollars here and there to people in his life. At one point, he intimated to his sister, Andrea Garrison-Robertson, that he was making so much that “you won’t never have to work again.” Motta was “impressed with what I was able to do” behind the wheel, Garrison later said. She even suggested that she might hook him up “with people in Los Angeles to do stunt driving.”

Motta’s most lucrative accident cases involved surgical procedures. Because pain is so subjective—and because of the difficulty in substantiating conditions such as whiplash and soft-tissue damage—surgery had the benefit not just of running up the clinical expense of an accident but also of seeming to ratify its legitimacy. After all, who would agree to be cut open on an operating table if it weren’t necessary?

Quite a lot of people, it turns out. According to Garrison, Alfortish explicitly advised that a participant would “get more money from the lawsuit” if he had surgery. Court documents suggest that Motta would sometimes become “upset” with clients who resisted this idea and would “harass” them until they agreed. One of Motta’s clients, a passenger named Dacha DeGruy, recalled, “She was saying if I get the surgery it’s more money. She said it would be ‘big-girl money.’ ” Degruy, who hadn’t actually been injured, declined Motta’s request, because, as she later explained, “I was kind of afraid to get surgery at twenty-one.” In 2018, Motta e-mailed an associate about a client who had consented to an unnecessary surgical procedure. “I was able to persuade him,” she wrote. “LOL.”

Astonishingly, Motta, Alfortish, and Garrison appear to have assumed that they could continue staging accident after accident on I-10, and filing lawsuits for insurance money, without ever being detected. Jim Donelon, the former insurance commissioner of Louisiana, later exclaimed to the press, “How dumb can you be? There’s a lot of intersections with eighteen-wheelers available to be targeted without doing it at the same corner over and over again.”

But the truth is that, even after trucking companies figured out what was happening in New Orleans, many were still inclined to settle, rather than attempt to convince a jury that they had been victims of fraud. Advocates of tort reform have described New Orleans as a “judicial hellhole,” a plaintiff-friendly arena where jurors tend to be sympathetic toward working-class locals and happy to slap a jumbo penalty on a faceless corporation. Peter Strasser, who served as a U.S. Attorney in New Orleans from 2018 to 2021, told me that, although the fraud was “obvious” to the trucking companies, they paid anyway, reasoning, “If we take this to a jury trial, then we’re really screwed.”

Of course, this willingness to settle only encouraged further fraud. It didn’t really hurt the insurance companies, either—they just raised their premiums. According to Donelon, fraudulent-accident claims relating to big-rig collisions increased the average yearly insurance costs for each family in Louisiana by as much as six hundred dollars. And, as another New Orleans attorney pointed out to me, skyrocketing premiums led “lots of people to drive without insurance, which in turn raises everybody’s rates even more.” The trucking companies, which often end up assuming some of the cost of settling, increase their prices, which in turn drives up the price of consumer goods. “It’s just a snowball of economic catastrophe,” the lawyer said.

Even so, by 2018, the fraud in New Orleans had grown so undeniable that the trucking companies and their lawyers could no longer ignore it. They ultimately tallied two hundred and forty-six truck accidents that appeared to have been staged in the area—and pinpointed Garrison as a common denominator in many of them. But, when they tried to obtain his phone records, Motta, acting on his behalf, fought vociferously to stop them, citing privacy rights. When defense attorneys insinuated that many of Motta’s accident cases seemed to have been staged, she counterpunched aggressively. If that were true, she scoffed, it would be “the largest conspiracy since the JFK assassination.” Not squeamish about playing a race card when the opportunity presented itself, Motta accused her opponents of believing that “if a person in the African American community knows or has any family relationship . . . with another person in the African American community who has ever been involved in an accident,” then they must be a “fraudulent individual.”

Behind her resolute façade, however, Motta was anxious. Law firms were drawing up lists of people associated with suspicious accidents, and it didn’t take a data scientist to notice some patterns. Just as Garrison had been instructed in the slammer’s art by Jeffrey Derouselle, Garrison had in turn taught Red Harris how to be a slammer. All told, at least twenty members of the Harris family had taken part in staged accidents. Harris initially got involved after his mother participated in a slammer accident and gave him Garrison’s phone number. In a kind of apprenticeship system, Harris first worked as a spotter, then graduated to driving slammer cars. As he put it, “Cornelius taught me the game.”

Motta began representing Harris, along with numerous members of his immediate and extended family. One of the law firms defending the trucking companies tallied fifty-three accidents that were connected to Motta and other attorneys with offices at 525 Clay Street. Motta had taken on so many cases that she enlisted a lawyer named Jason Baer to help her. One day, Baer texted her to express his concern that Garrison’s name was associated with too many crashes. “He’s fucked,” Baer wrote. “Way too much out there on him.” In fact, Baer told Motta, he’d heard that federal prosecutors might be looking into Garrison.

“Omg!!” Motta wrote. “I don’t deserve this.”

Baer appeared perplexed by this coy pretense of innocence. He later wrote, “Vanessa, you seem to forget that we have spoken with Cornelius Garrison and he admitted to running cases for lawyers.”

In January, 2019, another law firm representing the trucking companies passed information that it had gathered to the F.B.I., and the Bureau, working with federal prosecutors, quietly opened an investigation. Its code name was Operation Sideswipe. That October, Garrison was arrested by local police, on an unrelated charge. While he was in custody, F.B.I. agents paid him a visit, and Garrison agreed to secretly coöperate with their investigation.

One of the primary corridors running through New Orleans East is Chef Menteur Highway, a name that dates to the French colonial period and translates as “Chief Liar.” New Orleans East, originally established in the nineteen-sixties as a mostly white bedroom community sprawling toward the Mississippi border, eventually became a predominantly Black area. It was pummelled by Katrina and has never fully recovered. Sarah M. Broom, in her 2019 memoir, “The Yellow House,” notes that New Orleans East is “cut off” from the rest of the city by the Industrial Canal and can seem like a void to people from elsewhere—“a blank space on someone else’s map.” The area, an expanse of more than a hundred square miles, has been chronically under-resourced. According to the Times-Picayune, on some nights as few as four police officers patrol the entire district. Chef Menteur runs roughly parallel to the stretch of I-10 where the slammers staged so many accidents; Alfortish advised Garrison that it was best to do his slamming in a place where local—not state—police would respond, presumably because they were overworked and understaffed, and therefore more likely to generate a pro-forma accident report than to investigate. But another reason so many participants in the conspiracy selected New Orleans East may simply be that it was home. As Motta once put it, “People in east know each other . . . and all do business.”

One day, defense attorneys representing a trucking company studied the Facebook page of one of Motta’s former clients, Tiffany Turner, who’d been involved in a 2017 crash in which a Chevy Impala collided with a tractor-trailer. Turner had a son who had been in the accident with her, and two other sons who had been involved in separate truck collisions the same month she had; her ex-husband had been in yet another truck accident earlier that year. Turner’s case had frustrated the defense lawyers who had tried to investigate it: one passenger had claimed to be unable to answer questions because she suffered from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, insomnia, asthma, sleep apnea, and high blood pressure. On Turner’s Facebook page, however, the defense attorneys discovered a tantalizing comment posted from the account of a woman named Marlene Kennedy. It said, “TiffanyTurner sitting accidents up with 18 wheelers . . . now that’s f***** up.” Kennedy went on to suggest that the F.B.I. was “looking for Tiffany Turner and her crew that hang in Gentilly by Burger King.” (Gentilly is adjacent to New Orleans East.)

“My people, rejoice! I start therapy next week!”

Cartoon by Ellis Rosen

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In April, 2018, Kennedy was at a Church’s Texas Chicken on Chef Menteur when she was approached by a private investigator. Kennedy, who was in her late fifties, had cropped hair and a rueful smile. Her life had not been easy. She had struggled with addiction for decades and been imprisoned numerous times for shoplifting. In 2014, her daughter was fatally shot outside her home. Kennedy, for all her struggles, had a salty irrepressibility. It wasn’t just Turner staging accidents, she informed the private investigator; lots of people in New Orleans East were doing it. Some even argued that it was “legal,” she explained, because they were getting paid by lawyers. “It’s three generations of them doing it!” she exclaimed. People she knew were buying new cars, new furniture. Kennedy herself was financially “desperate,” she confessed, because of her addiction. She seemed envious of the money that people like Turner were making. But she would never participate in a slammer accident, she said. “Don’t seem right to me,” she declared. Besides, Kennedy added, with her luck she’d probably die in the crash.

As Kennedy talked, she caught herself, realizing that she might be acting imprudently. She wondered aloud if she could go into “witness protection,” noting, “People kill you behind that kind of stuff.”

“You want to try to be anonymous?” the private investigator asked, without making any commitments.

“That’s right,” Kennedy confirmed. Seeming reassured, she said, “I’m gonna take me some Suboxone and call it a fucking day.”

The private investigator did not keep Kennedy anonymous. The Facebook comment about Tiffany Turner was eventually entered into evidence, and lawyers asked to depose Kennedy in their cases. By then, she was locked up—shoplifting again—and it was at St. Tammany Parish Jail that she received a visit from a woman she’d never met: Vanessa Motta. Accompanying Motta was a man who Kennedy assumed was a police officer—understandably enough, given that he wore a badge on his hip and a hat that said “POLICE.” His name was Eddie Compass, and he hadn’t actually been a police officer since resigning as the chief of the New Orleans Police Department in 2005, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Compass now oversaw security at a local college, and moonlighted as an investigator for personal-injury attorneys.

His presence made Kennedy nervous. (She later said, of New Orleans cops, “They dirty.”) Motta had prepared an affidavit for Kennedy to sign, which retracted the Facebook comment and anything else she might have said about staged accidents. Kennedy, recognizing that she was being asked to sign a false statement, declined. So Motta and Compass left. But some days later they visited her again, and this time she signed. The document said, “I, Marlene Kennedy, do not know or have any personal knowledge of any fraud committed by anyone in any case,” and specified that she didn’t know anything about Tiffany Turner, Motta’s former client. The affidavit went on to claim that “investigators took advantage of me and my addiction,” suggesting that Kennedy had been paid off by insurance companies—she hadn’t—and concluding, “I said things that were not true so that I can get ‘cash.’ ”

Motta, triumphant, took the affidavit to get notarized. She was unaware that, like Garrison, Kennedy had also been approached by the F.B.I. The whole second meeting had been secretly recorded.

If Garrison was an exceptional slammer, he also turned out to be a stellar government informant. As a Department of Justice filing later acknowledged, “Garrison’s cooperation was extensive.” Across multiple meetings with F.B.I. agents and prosecutors, he implicated both Motta and Alfortish. In an initial interview, Garrison, who appeared to have a soft spot for Motta, claimed to agents that she “did not know the accidents were staged.” But soon he conceded that she had to have known, “because there were so many.”

An F.B.I. report from one of these sessions noted that, whenever Garrison staged collisions with big rigs, he “always drove,” because “it was potentially dangerous if someone did not know how to do them correctly.” Immediately following a crash, Garrison would hurry out of the car, telling one of the passengers, “Get in the driver’s seat and call 911.” (On at least one occasion, a truck’s onboard camera system captured video of this hasty two-step.)

In the interviews, Garrison confirmed that he had received a hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars’ worth of checks from Alfortish. Federal authorities realized that, with Garrison’s critical evidence, they could construct a major case. On one level, the slammer conspiracy was an amusing example of New Orleans chicanery at its most baroque, a tale of literal highway robbery so antic and absurd that it seemed like the plot of an Elmore Leonard novel. But, on a deeper level, it was an awful parable of economic desperation in twenty-first-century America. Scores of poor Black Louisianans had volunteered for what was effectively Russian roulette, risking their own lives and the lives of their loved ones in the hope of a onetime payout. The attorneys, by contrast, were well educated and mostly white, and would almost certainly have been loath to climb into a car with Garrison and go looking for a truck to hit. Of course, the lawyers had reaped the bulk of the financial rewards. Motta routinely demanded six- or seven-figure settlements, and contingency fees often ran as high as forty per cent. Actual payments to clients, however, could take years to come through, when they came through at all.

The reason Garrison was such a prized witness was that he straddled both ends of the conspiracy, liaising between down-and-out passengers and their felonious attorneys; he was the linchpin of the entire operation. In addition to the lawyers, there were doctors. When Motta and Alfortish referred clients to spinal surgeons and pain specialists, they used the same clinicians again and again, among them Peter Liechty, a surgeon who ran the One Spine Institute, and Eric Lonseth, a pain physician in Metairie. (Liechty died in 2024; Lonseth did not respond to requests for comment.) Actual spinal surgery was routine in these cases, and many of Motta’s clients bore scars from their procedures. To a shocking degree, the passengers appeared to rely on Motta and Alfortish not just for legal counsel but also for medical advice. “This case is going to be surgical and its a good one,” Alfortish wrote in a 2017 e-mail. On one occasion, a client of Motta’s slipped and called her Dr. Vanessa.

In January, 2020, one of the law firms representing the trucking companies sent Garrison a subpoena, asking him to sit for a deposition. Garrison told the F.B.I., and the Bureau proposed a secret surveillance operation. A few days later, Garrison, wearing a wire, met Alfortish at a local gas station and showed him the subpoena, which indicated that at the deposition he would be asked to lay out his connections to passengers in one of the crashes.

“You don’t know anything about that,” Alfortish said, coaching Garrison to claim that he “did not know anyone” related to the case.

When Motta learned of the deposition, she seemed unsure what to do. Like Alfortish, she wanted Garrison to say that he didn’t know anyone involved. But she couldn’t serve as his attorney at the deposition, because their whole arrangement necessitated some degree of deniability—and because she already represented the person who had initiated the lawsuit in question. Motta said that she’d found someone—an “old friend”—and they went to an office building downtown to meet him. As they ascended in an elevator, Motta assured Garrison that this lawyer had already been taught the cover story that Alfortish had been paying Garrison for construction work. She intimated that this new lawyer was a big personality. “He talks a little too much,” she said. “But funny, funny guy.” Entering an office suite, they were greeted by Brad Egenberg, the lawyer whose slogan was “Greedy for Ju$tice.” His Bradjesty.

Prior to the meeting, Egenberg and his wife had dined with Motta and Alfortish. Egenberg later explained that he’d agreed to work with Garrison as a favor to Motta; he told me that he’d related to her as a fellow up-and-coming personal-injury lawyer. (He disputes the idea that they were personal friends, however, and he insists that he knew nothing about Alfortish concealing payments to Garrison under the pretense of construction.) In any case, Egenberg did not end up representing Garrison for long, because another lawyer, a public defender named Claude Kelly, got in touch to say that he was actually Garrison’s counsel.

The revelation that Garrison had already engaged a public defender—and hadn’t told Motta about it—likely prompted her to suspect that he was working with the Feds. Garrison told his F.B.I. handlers that he wasn’t sure whom to trust—and that he no longer felt safe. As Kelly would later testify, Garrison seemed particularly fearful of Alfortish.

“He don’t play,” Garrison said.

That winter, Motta and Alfortish took a vacation to the Bahamas. After returning, the couple suggested to Garrison that perhaps he might also enjoy island life—permanently. Alfortish “offered to move me to the Bahamas,” Garrison reported to the F.B.I.

“It’s falling heavy right now,” Alfortish told Garrison in one recorded conversation. As Garrison subsequently related, Alfortish proposed a new scheme. He would pay Garrison half a million dollars if he “took the fall.” This would presumably mean claiming responsibility for staging the accidents—and asserting that Motta and Alfortish had believed the cases to be legitimate.

Garrison wasn’t inclined to take this offer. Among other reasons, he doubted that he’d ever receive such a big payoff. He had a cluster of scars on his back from a surgical procedure, performed in Baton Rouge a few years earlier, in which a doctor had fused two vertebrae in his spine. The surgery hadn’t been medically necessary, but Garrison had agreed to it, ostensibly to correct injuries sustained in an accident he’d staged with a charter bus in 2015. Back then, Motta was still in law school and Alfortish had only just been released from prison. But Garrison’s personal-injury lawsuit, which was handled by another local firm, had stalled, so he brought his case to Motta. She managed to disgorge nearly seven hundred thousand dollars from the defendants. Yet Garrison only ever received roughly ninety thousand, and he still suffered from pain, though it was unclear whether the pain derived from the bus accident, from other crashes, or from the surgery itself. His back was “always bothering him,” his mother said.

Eventually, Garrison confronted Motta about the sum he believed he was still owed from the bus-accident lawsuit. “If I don’t get my money, I’m going to call the Feds and tell them what you’re doing,” he warned.

“I’ve been good to you!” Motta protested, and began to cry.

As the pandemic set in, Garrison occasionally drove downtown in his Cadillac and met with Claude Kelly, the public defender, in his deserted office. “He was just a pleasure,” Kelly said later. “All he talked about were his kids.” Garrison’s younger son had played basketball for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette; this made Garrison proud. After whatever business they had that day was finished, he and Kelly would linger on the sidewalk. “We talked about his plans after this was all over,” Kelly said. Garrison knew that he would likely have to “take his lick” and serve some time, but after that he wanted to leave New Orleans and move to Seattle.

On September 18, 2020, the Justice Department unsealed a seven-count indictment charging Garrison with “staging over fifty accidents.” Alfortish and Motta weren’t indicted or named in the document, but they were described, respectively, as “Co-Conspirator A” and “Attorney B.” Garrison’s coöperation with the F.B.I. wasn’t referenced in the text—and it might have seemed that charging him in such a public fashion would be a good way to conceal his role as an informant. But a close reading of the filing encouraged certain inferences. One stray sentence asserted that “Co-Conspirator A instructed Garrison on the number of passengers to include in staged collisions.” Alfortish might have made some unconventional life choices, but he wasn’t a total idiot. He certainly hadn’t supplied that information to the Feds—and the only other person who could have done so was Garrison.

Four days after the indictment was made public, Garrison had dinner with his mother, Sandra Fontenette, who was seventy-four, at the tidy condominium that she owned, on Foy Street. They ate gumbo and talked. Garrison had been texting with a woman named Kim that afternoon, and they had made plans to hang out after dinner. At around eight-thirty, the doorbell rang, and Garrison went to meet her. But, upon opening the front door, he shouted to his mother, “Get down!” Ten shots rang out, and Garrison collapsed on the floor, dead.

Peter Strasser, the U.S. Attorney, was in his office when one of his prosecutors entered, looking shaken, and said that the key coöperating witness in the slammers case had just been murdered. “I would never have believed it, because this was a nonviolent case,” Strasser recalled. Louisiana is a death-penalty state, so for criminals there the calculus should be straightforward: it makes sense to risk the death penalty only if you might be facing it to begin with. But this was a fraud case. It felt like “a crisis moment,” Strasser said, adding, “One of the prosecutors on the case was afraid they were going to come after her next.”

The F.B.I. dispatched a special team from Washington, D.C., to help the Louisiana agents contend with a fraud investigation that had transformed into a murder conspiracy. Meanwhile, Operation Sideswipe kept expanding and racking up prosecutorial victories, building off the work of private-sector investigators and lawyers for the trucking companies. Mike Perlstein, a local TV journalist who covered the investigation, told me, “It was like handing the Feds this pretty massive case on a silver platter.” At the time of Garrison’s murder, twenty-eight people had already been charged. By the end of 2024, the indictment count would jump to sixty-three.

“Do you have this in a goldfish?”

Cartoon by Liam Francis Walsh

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From a distance, this resembled the progress of a racketeering case, in which prosecutors often start by picking off street-level pawns and then work their way up to the kingpins. But, in the slammers investigation, nearly all the people being prosecuted were pawns—passengers who’d agreed to ride in cars. “None of these people are professional criminals,” Strasser acknowledged to me. He said that most had pleaded guilty. “They fold immediately—it’s like dominoes.” Only one lawyer, and not a single doctor, had been charged. Perlstein reported each new benchmark in the case as it was announced, but privately he was growing skeptical. He characterized most of the passengers who rode with slammers as “church ladies who got convinced—or got greedy.” Perlstein started to wonder if the F.B.I. investigation “was shaping up to miss the big target and drag a bunch of poor Black people to jail.”

In January, 2024, a Times-Picayune reporter named John Simerman wrote an article about this disparity. One passenger in a slammer accident described the pitch she’d received: “You’re gonna get a bunch of money. You can come up off of this, and the legal firm is gonna make sure you get it.” In a town south of New Orleans, some locals had actually paid two hundred and fifty dollars each to be a passenger in a staged accident; nine neighbors along one street in the town had pleaded guilty to federal charges. “Nobody made any money—the lawyers made money, the doctors,” a fifty-eight-year-old passenger told Simerman. “I got to do eighteen months for what?” A woman who had been sentenced to probation emphasized her own modest circumstances by saying, “Where’s the Lamborghini?”

Marlene Kennedy, the shoplifter who had signed the fraudulent affidavit drawn up by Motta, ended up getting deposed by lawyers for one of the trucking companies. She was frustrated to have become tangled up in the case; she had been very clear to Motta and her supposed cop friend that she wanted no part of this drama. Kennedy felt as though she had become an instrument of larger forces that were indifferent, if not outright hostile, to her needs. “Not nobody here to defend me,” she blurted to the lawyers who had assembled to depose her. “Who here for Marlene Kennedy?”

The lawyers, having realized how comprehensively Motta appeared to be linked to different fraud cases, questioned Kennedy about her. But this only made Kennedy more flustered. “Ask her!” she countered. “You attorney, she attorney, right? Y’all should be talking to each other. Not to me. To her. Y’all went to college together. Y’all need to talk. Not me. I don’t have nothing to do with nothing.” They kept pressing, but to no avail. “I don’t remember,” Kennedy said. “I’m telling you, it’s like Alzheimer’s. Dementia. I don’t remember.” There was one attorney in the room whom she found more sympathetic. Recognizing his surname, she realized that he must be related to a kindly man who had facilitated a drug-treatment program she once took part in. Pulling this lawyer aside at the end of the deposition, Kennedy appealed to him directly: “You ain’t gonna let nobody hurt me, huh?”

The murder of Cornelius Garrison had the efficiency of a professional hit. His mother, who had witnessed the shooting from inside the apartment and called the police, said subsequently, “Whoever did that knew what they were doing.” When officers arrived, they found Garrison’s phone by his body, and they soon discovered the texts he’d been exchanging with Kim—the woman he’d been planning to meet.

“How mom’s doing?” Kim had texted not long before the shooting.

“She is good,” Garrison had replied.

“I’mma text you when I’m outside,” Kim wrote.

Tracing Kim’s number, investigators found that it corresponded to a burner phone that had been purchased at a local Family Dollar a day before the shooting. The phone had been paid for in cash, as had a second burner phone, and when authorities consulted the phone-service carrier they learned that the two burners had been in contact with each other on the day of the shooting. The Family Dollar had a CCTV system, so it was possible to pull up footage from the moment the phones were bought. When the buyer appeared on camera, investigators recognized a familiar face: Garrison’s fellow-slammer Red Harris.

Lawyers hired by trucking companies pieced together the conspiracy—and prosecutors eventually indicted several dozen New Orleans residents.

When the police went to arrest Harris, he was wearing the same sweatshirt he’d had on in the surveillance video. The authorities later determined that the person Garrison had thought he was texting, Kim, was in fact a New Orleans East woman named Jovanna Gardner. Harris and Gardner shared a child—and both were clients of Motta’s in accident cases. Under questioning, Gardner insisted that she hadn’t known she was setting Garrison up to be murdered. Her understanding had been that “the lawyers”—Motta and Alfortish—wanted to pay Garrison to stop coöperating with the authorities, but they were worried that he might not agree to meet for that purpose, and so Harris had instructed her to pose as a potential love interest. According to Gardner, “the lawyers” supplied Harris with the address where Garrison could be found. Later that night, she said, Harris had confessed to her that Garrison was dead, saying, “I killed him.”

After Garrison first taught Harris how to be a slammer, around 2016, the two had worked together productively for a time. But they fell out over money, and at one point Garrison told Motta that Harris was not to be trusted. On May 7, 2024, Harris and Gardner were charged with conspiracy to murder, along with wire fraud. Gardner pleaded guilty and began coöperating, telling police that, even though Harris was the father of her child, he had threatened to kill her if she told anyone about his role in the murder.

In a surprising development in early 2025, Harris also entered a guilty plea—and clarified to the F.B.I. that he had not personally carried out the murder. Instead, he implicated a man named Leon (Chunky) Parker, who was in a romantic relationship with Harris’s mother. On September 16, 2020, Harris had sent Parker a photo of a 9-millimetre he wanted to buy at a gun outlet in Metairie. “Man, that thing nice,” Parker texted back. “Almost look like mines.”

Harris did not end up buying the firearm, but, six days later, a gun of the same calibre was used to kill Garrison. Harris told authorities that, after the shooting, he and Parker had dumped the murder weapon in a canal.

According to Harris, when Alfortish and Motta became aware that Garrison was coöperating with authorities, they called him a “rat”—and intimated that it might be better if he were dead. Alfortish “wanted him gone,” Harris said. As for Motta, she told Harris that “she could not believe Garrison had done this to them after everything they’d done for him.”

Alfortish asked Harris if he knew anyone who could help solve the problem of Garrison. Harris organized a meeting at his auto-body shop with Chunky Parker. As a government filing later summarized, “During the meeting, Alfortish offered to pay Parker to murder Garrison.”

When authorities searched Harris’s auto-body shop, they discovered a blank retainer form for Motta, along with a contract in which Motta agreed to represent a cousin of Harris’s who was in a crash in November, 2023. A more cautious lawyer than Motta might have reacted to recent events—being referenced in a federal indictment, the murder of a former confidant—by backing away, at least temporarily, from truck-accident cases. Jason Baer, the lawyer who’d shared several cases with Motta, began the process of withdrawing as co-counsel at the first sign of a federal investigation. He later explained, “I was, like, ‘Man, I’m just a litigator. This is way past my pay grade.’ ” But Motta, with a brazenness that had become her signature, kept taking on new clients. “I already had to settle another case because of all this bullshit,” she complained to Baer impatiently. As Alfortish once observed, “My fiancée . . . loves to win.”

In December, 2024, Motta received a settlement offer in one of her accident cases on the very day that she, along with Alfortish, was finally indicted in the fraud scheme. Her law license was suspended, but even then she was determined not to give up her caseload. In a filing, Motta proposed designating an outside attorney named Lionel Sutton to take control of Motta Law, adding that she would keep working for the firm as a paralegal. A judge denied Motta’s request, saying that it would be “a danger to the public” for her to continue working in the profession.

Despite the non-negligible risk that she’d soon be in prison, Motta had given birth to a baby girl in 2023; Alfortish was the father. After the indictment, Motta, citing the needs of her children and her current inability to work, protested that she was facing “financial ruin,” and argued in one motion that she’d effectively “been ‘debanked’ (much like President Trump while he was being unjustly prosecuted).” Such claims of penury, however, were difficult to square with certain facts. When Motta was indicted, she had been permitted to stay out of prison pending trial. One condition of her bond was that she could not travel out of state without prior authorization from her probation officer. But, in a later filing, prosecutors revealed that Motta had gone to Biloxi, Mississippi, on multiple occasions, to gamble at the Beau Rivage Resort & Casino.

In fact, according to the government, between 2020 and 2025 Motta spent $836,401.81 playing slot machines at the Beau Rivage. Motta has claimed that this figure is misleading, explaining that it relates to an MGM Rewards card that she shares with her mother. But she did acknowledge visiting the casino, pointing out that in some cases she had received permission from pretrial services to bring her daughter Julia and one of Julia’s friends to hang out at the pool. If Motta chose to “unwind” with a little gambling after the children were in bed, she contended, this was “more than justified.” As for Motta’s mother, last year she petitioned the former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to drop the charges against her daughter, characterizing her indictment as a “targeted persecution.”

One rainy day this past December, I passed through security at the federal courthouse on Poydras Street, in downtown New Orleans, and took a seat in a windowless courtroom. The atmosphere was hushed and businesslike; this was a routine pretrial hearing, and only a few other spectators joined me in the gallery. A door opened and Alfortish shuffled in, escorted by marshals. He was surprisingly tall, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and plastic slides. Until the end of 2024, Alfortish had been a free man, and he would often show up at local horse races, sometimes with Motta and the children. He had been training horses, and having some luck at the track. In a video from 2023, he spoke at Fair Grounds Race Course, in New Orleans, boasting about a Thoroughbred he’d named Julia’s Warrior, for Motta’s older daughter. Motta and Julia were with him, and he gestured to Julia and said, “Without trying to cry, this one here has been through a ton. . . . Let’s just hope the horse is as special as you are.” Motta, in a floral dress, praised Alfortish’s “dedication.” Julia’s Warrior won a six-furlong race in November, 2024. Less than a month later, Alfortish was indicted.

In the courtroom, Alfortish’s face looked gaunt after spending roughly a year in prison, and his hair, thinning now, had gone white. Motta entered, dressed in a black suit and Louboutin heels. Their relationship had struck me as having an amour-fou quality, so I had half anticipated a histrionic display of affection. But Motta strode directly to the defense table, straight-backed and all business, as though she were just another attorney in this proceeding, rather than a lead defendant. Acknowledging her shackled fiancé with the briefest and tightest of smiles, she took a seat.

It seemed highly probable that Alfortish, who was fifty-eight, might spend the rest of his life in prison. Not only did he have a previous felony conviction; he also faced the additional charge of conspiring to murder a federal witness. As I watched the strained interactions between Alfortish and Motta in the courtroom, I wondered if, given that the child they shared was still just a toddler, they had concluded that their best shot at keeping at least one parent out of prison was for Motta to turn on her partner.

When the first of two trials began, in early March, it became evident that this was indeed the strategy. The judge, Wendy Vitter, had split the case into two separate proceedings. First, Motta would face fraud charges relating to the staged accidents; then, in a trial scheduled for August, Alfortish would face his own fraud charges while also being tried, with Chunky Parker, for the murder of Garrison. (Both have pleaded not guilty.)

“The heart wants what the heart wants,” Motta’s lawyer, Sean Toomey, told the jury, describing a naïve young woman who had fallen under the spell of a malign and more mature Svengali. In his opening statement, Toomey described Motta three times as a “baby lawyer,” and at different points in the trial he suggested that she was “inexperienced,” “a bad lawyer,” even “stupid,” and that she had “terrible taste in men.” Motta had been completely unaware that the accidents Garrison and Alfortish had brought her were illegitimate, Toomey insisted.

But prosecutors presented an avalanche of evidence to indicate that Motta was anything but naïve—and that she’d known all along what Garrison was doing. Red Harris, his arms inked with tattoos, testified that Motta had explicitly directed him to slam, recalling, “She said make sure I hit ’em right, and that the policy was high.” Former clients described Motta encouraging people to get surgeries, and others discussed one particularly shameless episode in which a large church van, crammed with prospective plaintiffs, intentionally collided with a truck. A dash-cam video from another incident, which was played for the jury, showed Garrison exiting a Toyota S.U.V. after smashing it into an eighteen-wheeler and walking calmly along I-10, as traffic whizzed past, before climbing into a spotter car and driving off.

Although Motta dressed demurely for court, she seemed incapable of maintaining a poker face. Most days, she sat at the defense table with her back to the jury, which struck me as an odd choice; then it occurred to me that her lawyer may have insisted on it, lest jurors witness the dramatic eye rolls and arch expressions of indignation with which she tended to greet testimony by government witnesses. Alfortish wasn’t in the courtroom during the trial, but his presence hung heavy in the air. “Alfortish and Motta were partners in business, romance, and crime,” one prosecutor said, and Garrison had been murdered because he “was a threat” to both of them.

The trial lasted three weeks, but when the case went to the jury, on March 20th, deliberations took less than six hours. The jurors found Motta guilty of fraud, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. According to someone who knows her, she had remained stubbornly, irrationally overconfident about her prospects, even as damning evidence against her accumulated by the day.

When Judge Vitter read the verdict, Motta started to shake and cry. The courtroom erupted. Motta’s mother shrieked and appeared to faint, collapsing on the ground. Motta hunched over and vomited into a trash can. “I have no reason whatsoever to believe that she is naïve, or under the influence of anyone else,” Vitter said, adding that, though Motta might not be charged in relation to Garrison’s murder, she had unquestionably “acquiesced in the death of a witness.” Vitter announced that Motta would be taken into custody immediately, rather than permitted to remain free until her sentencing. She could get up to twenty years in prison.

A car crash, the novelist J. G. Ballard once suggested, is “probably the most dramatic event in our lives apart from our own deaths.” After the murder of Garrison, his sister, Andrea Garrison-Robertson, reflected glumly, “When people love money, they do things.” It is tempting to wonder whether Motta’s conviction, and the murder trial this summer, might give rise to any sustained policy reform. For all the resources that the U.S. government devoted to Operation Sideswipe, the case is notable for the many implicated parties who have not been indicted. No doctors appear to be facing consequences. As Peter Strasser, the former U.S. Attorney, explained to me, it can be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a clinician knew a procedure was medically unnecessary, even if the same surgeons repeatedly worked with the same nefarious lawyers, conducting gratuitous surgical procedures again and again. Jason Giles, the bent lawyer at the King Firm who worked with Garrison and with Damian Labeaud, was tried in the same proceeding as Motta, and was also convicted. The two other partners who founded the King Firm with Giles were implicated in trial testimony, suggesting that they were either aware of or active participants in fraudulent accident cases. But they have not been charged and are still licensed to practice law in Louisiana. (Neither responded to requests for comment.)

The prospect of serious tort reform in the state seems unlikely. Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s governor, has claimed that he wants to “rein in” the ubiquitous advertising of trial lawyers, but the state legislature, which is generously subsidized by the plaintiffs’ bar, has a history of stymieing such correctives, and more than one local attorney suggested to me that Landry’s comments are no more than lip service. By many measures, Louisiana now has the second-highest auto-insurance rates in the country, trailing only Florida. And the business of litigating accidents has become so lucrative that, earlier this year, one Baton Rouge personal-injury firm announced a novel partnership with a private-equity fund. It’s a queasy indication of what may lie ahead.

Not long ago, I drove out to Clay Street, in Kenner, which runs through a light-industrial stretch between the Mississippi River and a drainage canal. The sky was gray and the grass along the railroad track was overgrown. Alfortish sold the building at 525 Clay around the time the Feds started investigating him, and Motta Law has vacated the premises. But, when I approached the building, I saw that it was still home to law offices. Out front was a parked Jeep that had been decorated in garish camouflage and emblazoned with the grinning face of a man who went by Lawyer Don. It was a billboard on wheels. I wondered if Lawyer Don used the Jeep for his commute to work or if he kept something more sensible out back. “Personal Injury Response Vehicle,” a sign on the Jeep announced. “Don’t Take Any Bull from the Insurance Company!” ♦

In early February, Elora Mukherjee, who runs one of the country’s leading immigrants’-rights clinics, at Columbia Law School, told me about a client of hers who was detained in South Texas. The client, Mukherjee explained, was in the midst of a life-threatening medical crisis. What’s more, she was eighteen months old. Baby Amalia, as Mukherjee called her, had been sent to a San Antonio hospital with critically low oxygen levels. She’d spent more than a week in intensive care, where she and her mother were watched by ICE agents. After being discharged from the hospital, the toddler had been sent back to the place where she had nearly died: the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, where many children had severe respiratory illnesses. “The doctors prescribed Amalia a medication by nebulizer,” Mukherjee told me, but, when the child and her mother returned to Dilley, “the officers took those meds.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that any claims that Amalia “did not receive her medication or proper medical treatment” are false.)

For months, I’d been investigating how the suffering of children, including infants and toddlers, has become central to the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy. In Chicago and Portland, Oregon, federal agents had fired chemical munitions at children. In Idaho, I reviewed evidence of children being swept up in a vast and violent immigration raid on a family-friendly horse race and zip-tied until their wrists bruised or bled.

When children’s bodies bear the brunt of federal immigration enforcement, it’s not merely a matter of collateral damage. In the first days of Donald Trump’s second term, his Administration launched a series of executive actions that, in effect, directed immigration enforcement against kids. Under Joe Biden, D.H.S. had designated “protected areas,” where ICE and Customs and Border Protection were discouraged from conducting operations; these included places “where children gather.” Trump’s D.H.S. rescinded that designation, freeing agents to target children, parents, and caregivers at playgrounds, child-care centers, and schools. (In March, Democrats in Congress released a report that documented forty-two such incidents in or around “schools, school bus stops, and day care centers,” with “devastating consequences for children learning and being cared for at these locations.”) Similarly, Trump’s Executive Office for Immigration Review cancelled a Biden-era memo that urged immigration judges to adopt “child-friendly courtroom procedures.” Later, a new ICE initiative urged agents to track down unaccompanied migrant children, ostensibly to insure that they weren’t being trafficked but also, in many cases, to deport them. “The real through line is a strategic and coördinated effort specifically to target kids, with the goal to make life so unbearable for immigrant families at every point of contact that they feel they have no choice but to leave,” Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrants’-rights group, told me.

The harm to children is particularly clear in the Trump Administration’s revival and expansion of family detention at Dilley, where Amalia and more than five thousand other children and parents have been held during the past year. In a report released on April 1st, Human Rights First and RAICES—two major nonprofits working on immigrants’ rights—offer a close look at what they call a “new era of ICE family prisons.” Based on interviews with thirty-five families who have spent time during the past year in family detention and more than three hundred legal cases in which RAICES has represented asylum seekers, the report describes more than a dozen family separations that have been conducted by U.S. immigration enforcement since Trump returned to office; most of the incidents occurred at Dilley. It also alleges that significant due-process violations have led to the summary deportations of children and families with credible asylum claims. And it documents accounts of widespread medical neglect of children, including infants, in the care of CoreCivic, the private contractor that operates Dilley, which reported more than two billion dollars in total revenue last year. Faisal al-Juburi, a co-C.E.O. of RAICES, told me, “Right now, the egregious medical neglect alone could, isolated from all the other horrors, be considered clear evidence of intentional harm.” (D.H.S. said that all detainees receive due process and proper medical treatment. The agency also denied that ICE targets children.)

This January, the average daily population at Dilley soared to more than nine hundred. By mid-March, it fell to under a hundred before rising again. Robyn Barnard, a co-author of the report and the senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First, told me, “There is no indication that they plan to wind down at Dilley.” She was aware of at least two families in the facility who’d been there for longer than a hundred days—more than five times the legal limit for holding a child in immigration detention, as indicated by a settlement called the Flores agreement. “If these are the horrors we know about, what are the ones we still don’t know about?” she asked. She also pointed out that, unlike in the past, many of the families detained at Dilley had put down roots in the U.S. In early April, I spoke to an Indian family of four who’d lived in the Los Angeles area since 2022; when we talked, they’d been held at Dilley for nearly fifty days. The father, Jagdish, told me that one of his children was vomiting and the other had bloody stools; both were depressed. “The suffering is too big,” he said.

Amalia and her parents, Stiven Arrieta Prieto and Kheilin Valero Marcano, were released in early February. On their first weekend out of detention, Prieto and Marcano sat down at a sponsor’s home to speak with me, joined by Mukherjee and three law students who’d worked many late nights to get them released. “I want to be a spokesperson for all the women with children at Dilley who are living with the nerves and desperation of not knowing if their child will survive,” Marcano told me. “So that they won’t lose hope. So that they won’t keep living in purgatory.”

Amalia was a healthy child last December 11th, when she and her parents were arrested by immigration-enforcement officials in El Paso. Prieto and Marcano had grown up in Venezuela, a country they never wanted to leave. But, in 2024, they sought asylum in the U.S., on the basis that they had opposed the Nicolás Maduro regime and faced persecution.

They took all the steps required by the Biden Administration. Arriving at the southern border, they registered for an appointment with Customs and Border Protection. They then waited for months in Mexico, during which time Marcano gave birth to Amalia. The family received an immigration court date in 2027 and were granted humanitarian parole, a status that allowed them to live lawfully in the U.S. until they appeared in court.

“I love listening to the birds in the morning.”

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The family moved to El Paso, where they found a playground that Amalia loved and a close-knit church. Amalia learned her first words: “Mamá,” “Papá,” and “agua.” But, in 2025, the Trump Administration attempted to terminate many forms of immigration protection for asylum seekers, including humanitarian parole programs, and began apprehending families who were awaiting their chance to go before a judge. (“The law requires those in the country illegally claiming asylum to be detained pending removal,” a D.H.S. spokesperson told me.) In early December, Prieto was told to show up for an immigration check-in at an earlier date than ICE had initially requested and to bring his family. He complied. At the check-in, Prieto, Marcano, and Amalia were arrested. They weren’t provided with arrest warrants or any paperwork explaining why they were being apprehended. Amalia cried after the family was loaded into a van full of other parents and young children. “Why are you doing this?” Prieto asked the immigration agents. He recalled that an agent replied, “It’s a change of Administration. They pay us to deport you.”

When the family reached Dilley, they noticed that the water smelled strange. At the commissary, Prieto bought packs of bottled water, which they reserved for Amalia. (RAICES and Human Rights First note that families at Dilley routinely describe water that is “unclean, foul-smelling, and causes stomachaches”; bottled water, the report observes, must be purchased, despite the fact that detainees have typically been stripped of any sources of income.) In the cafeteria, Marcano told me, “a girl pulled a bug from her hamburger meat and showed it to all of us—and the kids didn’t eat that day.” Then, Marcano recalled, “the kids started falling sick.” (CoreCivic said that inspections have confirmed that the water at Dilley is “safe and clean for consumption” and that it has no record of a bug being removed from food at the facility.)

On January 1st, Amalia developed a high fever. The next day, Marcano took her to Dilley’s medical clinic; she told me that a clinician prescribed Amalia ibuprofen. The same thing happened the following day. “A fever is good, because it means she’s fighting off a virus,” Marcano recalled a clinician saying. But the fever didn’t go away, and Amalia was clearly suffering. After nearly two weeks, she began vomiting and having diarrhea.

Often, Marcano had to stand in line for hours with her sick daughter to insure that Amalia was seen by Dilley’s medical team. She waited in line at least eight times, she told me, only to get her concerns shrugged off by the staff. One day, after Marcano tried to lower her daughter’s temperature with a cool bath, Amalia lost consciousness. Marcano went back to the clinic and screamed, “Are you going to watch my baby die in my arms?”

Family detention is hardly unique to the Trump Administration. George W. Bush launched the first large-scale, for-profit family-detention facility, although it proved short-lived, on account of legal challenges and public outcry. The Obama Administration revived the concept in 2014 by opening family-detention camps, including Dilley, to deal with an influx of asylum seekers from Central America. At an event marking the opening of Dilley, Jeh Johnson, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, described the detention center as an “effective deterrent” against the rise in family border crossings. By the summer of 2015, the facility reportedly held more than seventeen hundred people, about a thousand of them children. When I first interviewed Mukherjee about Dilley, years ago, she was helping to coördinate an effort to provide pro-bono legal representation to families there. Back then, Mukherjee took her law students on an annual trip to Dilley; some of the students called it “spring break in baby jail.”

During the Obama Administration, allegations of neglect at Dilley were common. I wrote about a client of Mukherjee’s, a Honduran asylum seeker named Suny Rodríguez, who’d been detained there with her seven-year-old son for four months, in violation of Flores. In federal court, the pair alleged that they were subjected to “inhumane conditions” (including disregard for Rodríguez’s son’s asthma and weight loss), pressured to self-deport, and threatened with separation, claims for which they reached a settlement. Similarly, a group of ten mothers filed formal complaints in 2016, alleging substandard medical care in D.H.S. custody. One of those mothers noted, “I thought I came to this country to escape abuse, mistreatment, and disrespect. But it’s the same here.”

During Trump’s first term, family detention soared, and so, too, did accounts of medical horrors at Dilley. In the spring of 2018, a Guatemalan toddler contracted a respiratory infection there and died six weeks after being released; then, between September of 2018 and May of 2019, six children died in U.S. immigration custody, after nearly a decade without any such deaths. Under Biden, Dilley was shuttered. Asylum seekers were largely allowed to await their court dates outside detention, and many, like Amalia’s family, were granted humanitarian parole.

The second Trump Administration reopened Dilley in March of last year. By January 16, 2026, more than five hundred and fifty children were held in ICE detention, according to government data analyzed by the Marshall Project. Recently, detained families at Dilley have come from such countries as Afghanistan, China, Colombia, Haiti, Russia, and Uzbekistan. Often, Juburi and Barnard told me, children from non-Spanish-speaking countries have been asked to translate for their parents in high-stakes interactions with ICE officers, owing to Dilley’s limited interpretation services.

According to Barnard, the center has both threatened family separations and enacted them. “Many of the families we interviewed recounted being threatened that, if you don’t comply with us, we will separate you from your loved ones,” Barnard said.

In one case, an eleven-year-old boy and his parents fled Mongolia, flying to Chicago with the intention of seeking asylum. D.H.S. sent the family to Dilley, where officials, lacking a translator, allegedly asked the boy to inform his parents that ICE intended to separate him from them. The parents were shackled and sent to adult detention; the child was shipped to a federal shelter as an unaccompanied minor. “I am devastated,” the mother said in an official declaration. “ICE officers have not explained anything to me.” The family was only reunited two months later, in order to be deported back to Mongolia.

In another case, a thirty-seven-year-old woman from China and her ten-year-old son sought asylum at the border in San Diego. They were taken to the airport, where, she said, agents told her that she could accept deportation to China with her son or be forced to return on her own and have him “taken away” from her. She physically resisted and was briefly dragged by an agent. (In a sworn statement, she recounted one of the agents saying, “Fuck! You’re going on a military plane back to China!”) The mother and her son were sent to Dilley. There, according to RAICES records, they were officially separated: the son was sent, alone, to a federal shelter in New York, while she was sent to detention centers, first in New Jersey, and then in Texas and New Mexico. As of early April, the two remained separated.

Before they were arrested by the Trump Administration, Amalia and her parents had been granted humanitarian parole under Biden.

Often, threats of family separation work hand in hand with medical neglect, Juburi told me, persuading families to accept deportation. He described the case of a woman and her five-year-old daughter who were apprehended in an ICE raid in Chicago last September, then transferred to Dilley. The mother, he said, had ovarian cysts and, because she couldn’t access her usual medication while at Dilley, experienced profuse bleeding; she agreed to “voluntary departure” with her daughter because she didn’t want to die of blood loss in front of her. Juburi said that his team has represented scores of families who’ve accepted deportation only in the context of serious medical neglect. “Parents make these life-threatening journeys to the U.S. in service to their children, for their children’s safety, and so this Administration is very well aware of that parental psychology, that the parents would do anything to insure their child isn’t harmed,” he told me. “The evidence at Dilley points to the weaponization of that primal instinct.”

At one point, when Amalia was extremely sick, an ICE officer approached Prieto and Marcano and pressured them to sign paperwork that they could not understand. Mukherjee later told me that it was a motion intended to withdraw their application for admission to the U.S. “They felt they had no choice but to sign,” she said. “Had we not intervened, it would have resulted in their deportations.”

A few days after the incident in which Amalia lost consciousness, Marcano brought her back to the clinic at Dilley. A staffer measured Amalia’s blood-oxygen saturation—which, in a healthy individual, is between ninety-five and a hundred per cent—and found that it was in the low fifties. “Such a low amount of oxygen going to the brain can, if it’s long enough, kill off parts of the brain—it’s really, really high-stakes,” Prantik Saha, a pediatrician who reviewed Amalia’s medical records, told me. “It’s shocking that this level of callousness and omission of care could occur.” Amalia was taken to a local hospital, where it became clear that she needed care beyond what the facility could provide. She was transferred to a larger hospital in San Antonio, where she was given five diagnoses: Covid-19, RSV, bronchitis, pneumonia, and an ear infection. She received supplemental oxygen and intensive care.

While at the hospital with her daughter, Marcano sometimes went to the bathroom, kneeled on the floor, and prayed, “Don’t let Amalia die!” As she watched over her daughter, two ICE agents monitored the pair at all times, even when Amalia was breast-feeding. “The officers never left me alone,” Marcano told me. “If a nurse entered, they’d write it down, and if I moved to touch my baby, they’d write it down.”

On the second day in the hospital, the nurses kindly gave Marcano a bag of clothes and hygiene items for her and Amalia. An ICE agent angrily confronted the nurses, Marcano told me, and scolded her, too. “I don’t know why the nurses are giving you gifts like you’re a beggar,” Marcano recalled him saying. He told her that she should be grateful for the expensive medical care her daughter was receiving: “The nurses don’t understand that ICE is your protector.”

After ten days, Amalia and her mother were returned to Dilley. At that point, Mukherjee and her team got involved in Amalia’s case. “In previous Administrations, including the first Trump Administration, when I came across a kid with severe medical needs in detention, I could almost always work with ICE to insure that the child and parents were released,” Mukherjee said. But, during the past year, “in case after case, requests for parole that usually would have been granted in the past were ignored or denied.”

When that happened, she’d send a second urgent request. If needed, she’d send a third, including “medical testimony from highly respected experts in the field, sworn under oath.” When that proved fruitless—as it did in Amalia’s case—she’d turn to working with organizations such as RAICES and the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit legal group, to file a federal habeas petition pleading with the court for a family’s release. Essentially, she told me in early February, ICE was “no longer engaging in any individualized consideration of a toddler or baby’s urgent humanitarian needs.”

Older children endure their own kinds of pain. Shortly after meeting Amalia and her parents, I interviewed a Russian family of five in detention at Dilley, who’d also become clients of Mukherjee’s. The family spoke to me on a video call from Dilley. The youngest, a four-year-old boy named Konstantin, held up a drawing of a train he’d just made. “He said, ‘This train will take us away from here!’ ” his mother, a former nurse named Oksana, told me. Beside her sat her thirteen-year-old son, Kirill, a talented pianist who spent the interview with his head buried in his hands. Oksana’s eleven-year-old daughter, Kamilla, began the call upright but looked exhausted; she soon lay down on the bare floor without a pillow. Back in Russia, she’d been in a dance troupe. “She’s a very creative kid, and she loves to read poetry,” her mother told me.

The family, like Amalia’s, had come to the U.S. legally, seeking asylum. They fled first to Mexico, then presented themselves, last October 5th, at an official port of entry in San Diego. Their suffering, like Amalia’s, began promptly. First, they were detained in a Customs and Border Protection facility, where, Oksana told me, “we’d knock for an hour just to try to get them to let our kids go to the bathroom.” Oksana’s husband was separated from the rest of the family and held in a one-person cell, where he fell ill with a high fever. Soon, the whole family was sent to Dilley, where medical personnel seemed poorly equipped to address his symptoms; Oksana saw the staff Googling them. Meanwhile, Kamilla had developed a shooting pain in her ear. “They said, ‘Everything looks good,’ ” Oksana told me of the intake officials.

The next day, Oksana brought Kamilla to the medical office. Confident that her daughter had an ear infection, she wanted to obtain proper antibiotics. She was dismissed, she told me, but soon returned. This time, she recalled, a clinician said that it was just allergies and gave Kamilla antihistamines, telling them, “You came to the dustiest state!”

“I was outraged,” Oksana told me. “As a former medical professional, I can tell the difference between an ear infection and allergies!”

“After I created a ruckus, the nurse said, ‘Fine, give her an antibiotic,’ ” Oksana said. To obtain antibiotics and ear drops, Oksana and Kamilla had to stand in a long outdoor line. “We stood in line for two hours that night, in the cold, my child with a high fever and ear pain, until we finally got the drops,” Oksana said. She found it peculiar that the drops were in an unmarked vial; it was cold to the touch. She tried to warm the vial with her hands before administering the drops to her daughter. “But the guards said, ‘You’re holding up the line, you have to give them to her right now!’ ” Oksana told me. “They intimidated me, and so I did it, and right away Kamilla started crying and complaining of sharp pain. Pus started pouring from her ear.”

After weeks in family detention, Amalia had critically low oxygen levels. At a hospital, she received five diagnoses, including RSV and pneumonia.

Oksana shook her head as she recounted this to me; Kamilla remained motionless on the floor. “She cried that entire night,” Oksana continued. “After this treatment—if you can call it a treatment—my daughter said, ‘I can’t hear in this ear.’ It’s been nearly four months, and still her hearing has not been restored.” By the time we spoke, the family had been in detention for more than a hundred and twenty days—six times the legal limit.

Oksana told me that she had concluded that many of the people at Dilley were not qualified to administer the medical services that they were providing. Similar concerns had been raised about medical care in family detention during the first Trump Administration. In 2023, researchers affiliated with Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital analyzed the medical records of a hundred and sixty-five children who’d been held in family detention in Karnes County, Texas, between June, 2018, and October, 2020. According to the report, “There appeared to be a preponderance of providers practicing outside of their scope” and a “lack of pediatric-specific medical knowledge, evident in many medical records and inadequate documentation of medical reasoning.” More recently, the Human Rights First and RAICES report alleged “consistent patterns” with medical care at Dilley: “delayed and denied treatments, misdiagnoses, ignored emergencies, and direct interference with ongoing care.”

At the end of our interview, Kamilla rose from the floor. She perked up as her mother described the small collection of Russian-language books that Kamilla had cherished in detention, provided by the facility: the fairy tales of Pushkin, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” and the work of a Russian poet named Korney Chukovsky. Oksana seemed flush with a mix of pride and devastation as she spoke of her daughter’s literary curiosity. She told me, “Kamilla is turning twelve tomorrow.” She added that recently a woman had been released on her birthday. “So she got the idea that ICE gives birthday gifts and that maybe tomorrow, because of her birthday, she will be released.” Oksana had to urge Kamilla not to hope for their immediate freedom. She told me, “I’d always heard that America is wonderful with children, and that there’s so much love and nurturing toward kids here.” She continued, “So we’re bewildered. Is this not America?”

Prompt release wasn’t impossible for the family, I knew. Unlike many others in detention, they had an expert legal team. On the night of February 6th, I’d got word from Mukherjee that, after fifty-seven days in detention, Amalia and her parents had been released from Dilley. A staffer had driven the family more than an hour to Laredo and dropped them at a migrant shelter, without returning Amalia’s birth certificate, her vaccination records, or the medications she’d been prescribed at the hospital. (The family did eventually receive copies of the documents, after multiple requests.) They made their way to their sponsor’s home in California, where Amalia found balloons awaiting her, along with a music box and a train set.

When I spoke to the family, two nights later on Zoom, they looked elated to be sitting on a comfortable red couch, with Amalia snuggling into her mother’s arms. Marcano wore her hair in braids and smiled often. After an hour or so, Amalia fell asleep. “Amalia loved the welcome balloons,” Marcano said, as she cradled the sleeping child. “She loved tossing them in the air.”

Not long after that conversation, Mukherjee sent me more news: Oksana’s family was also slated for release. Soon, she told me, all five of them would be en route to a sponsor’s home, also in California. She took this development as a sign of progress; increasingly, she’s been able to get families out of detention after two or three parole requests. Still, Mukherjee told me, “Literally every day, I’m getting phone calls from families detained at Dilley who need help. It’s just one horrifying situation after another.”

When I spoke to the Indian family of four at Dilley, Guri, aged twelve, told me that he missed playing soccer at his school, back in L.A. Now, he said, he felt like “a bird in a cage—they just feed you and keep you here, like you’re trapped.” His sister, Manpreet, an eleven-year-old math whiz, had been at the medical clinic the night before we spoke, seeking help for vomiting, only to be turned away. That incident and others like it made her angry: “It’s like when you’re locked in a place and you can’t move anywhere and you don’t even have a little bit of freedom.” Soon, their parents began to weep. “Before being here, my daughter spoke normally, but now, she lashes out,” their father told me. Watching both of his children struggle with confinement and medical neglect had been, he said, a form of “mental torture.”

Recently, I looked up Korney Chukovsky, whose poetry Kamilla had been reading. One of his series, I learned, features a character named Dr. Aybolit—which translates loosely to “Dr. Ouch It Hurts”—who tends to the ailments of animals. When presented with a medical crisis, Dr. Aybolit acts with great skill and compassion: “No problem,” he calls out in one poem. “Give it here!” A mother hare is so pleased, at one point, that she laughs and shouts, “Well, thank you, Aybolit!”

I could see why Kamilla might have loved Chukovsky, and not just for his sense of humor. I sent her and her mother one of the poems I’d encountered in translation. When the doctor learns of young animals sick with cholera, appendicitis, malaria, and bronchitis, he races across fields, forests, and mountains to treat them. By the poem’s end, one of the creatures calls out, “Glory, glory . . . Glory to the good doctors!” ♦

“You know how sometimes you don’t know what something is really about?” the London-based screenwriter Ed Solomon (“Men in Black,” the “Bill & Ted” movies) cryptically asked the other day, in SoHo. “And, in fact, you block yourself emotionally from it completely?” The question was posed in a claustrophobe’s nightmare of an unmarked elevator, entered from street level, which felt like it could lead anywhere—perhaps to Socrates’ Athens or the Mongol Empire. The destination, alas, was only the Tara Downs art gallery.

“I like this piece,” Solomon noted, peering at a semiabstract work by Sofía Sinibaldi, “Remediation (The Past Creates the Future).” His latest film, “The Christophers,” directed by Steven Soderbergh, features Michaela Coel as a disillusioned young painter who’s hired by the money-grubbing children of a bitter, lapsed artist (Ian McKellen) to forge some of his unfinished portraits. Coel signs on as McKellen’s assistant; shifts in desiderata and allegiance ensue.

“I always wanted to make a movie about the relationships that I’ve had with certain mentors,” Solomon said—specifically, four male figures who, feeling villainized or betrayed, retreated from the public eye. Over pints one night, Soderbergh mentioned toying with the idea of a “chamber kind of thing—think of ‘The Dresser,’ but with more of a Patricia Highsmith bent.” Maybe this was Solomon’s chance.

They shot the film in nineteen days, in 2025. Solomon realized recently that his mother, Maxine, had inspired the script, too. “She’s a painter! She quit for nine years to be a parent. But she returned to it.” She’s since had to retire, at ninety-two. Solomon pulled up Maxine’s website, where she quotes the artist Richard Diebenkorn: “I can never accomplish what I want. Only what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.” Maxine used both additive and subtractive painting processes to build textured canvases. “The more she did, the more she would obfuscate,” Solomon said.

His mother taught him “never to paint within the lines,” a lesson he plans to impart to his youngest, crayon-wielding child. In “The Christophers,” Coel’s character first starts painting after seeing the show “Enfant Terrible,” made up of work created by art stars in their youth. McKellen’s character supplied a piece titled “Anyone Can Do This and Call It Art.”

At Dimin gallery, Solomon studied a blue-and-orange canvas, and explained that his mom favored a specific type of paintbrush. Around twenty-five years ago, the manufacturer stopped making them. “They were basically dead stock,” Solomon said. She rallied her artist friends around San Francisco to all order a bunch.

“Every year, she’d go through one brush,” Solomon said. “And two years ago was her last brush. I have photos of her holding that brush.” McKellen’s character hasn’t painted in decades. He’s kept himself afloat by slinging quips on a reality-TV show called “Art Fight” (he tells one contestant to title a piece “Why My Therapist Chose Early Retirement No. 7”) and filming Cameo videos for fans, in a blue beret, by the glow of a ring light.

At Bortolami gallery, Solomon said that he had consulted the Pop artist Jann Haworth, who co-designed the “Sgt. Pepper” album cover, to get a sense of the British art world of McKellen’s character’s prime. “When Michaela is verbally undressing Ian, and basically saying, ‘I know you better than you think I know you, and I know you maybe even better than you are willing to acknowledge you know yourself’—I wrote a version of that speech with Jann’s help,” Solomon said. He also sent it to his mother for review.

Solomon strolled over to the Odeon, for some art respite and fries, and recounted watching both “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “The Christophers” at a Toronto film festival, during which he’d noticed a through line: “ ‘Bill & Ted’ is a film about the exuberance of two very optimistic people who really believe that their art”—a metal band called Wyld Stallyns—“matters, and that they will live forever through their art. And then here you have this movie about two people who have given up on the idea of letting others see their work.”

Another adviser on “The Christophers” was the art restorer Lisa Rosen, who offered tips on pulling off a convincing restoration (or forgery). “She was talking about literally the ability now to find an artist’s DNA on material,” Solomon said. In the film, Coel digs up some of McKellen’s old paintbrushes that she says “have been dead stock for decades” and remarks, “The microfibres alone would vet—huge.” ♦

The fashion designer Sandy Liang recently boarded a hundred-year-old wood-panelled elevator in the basement of the Frick Collection and rode it to the museum’s first floor. There, she was ushered into the Cabinet Gallery for a private preview of “Ruffles & Ribbons,” a new exhibition of two dozen fashion plates, the hand-colored engravings that preceded fashion magazines, from the time of Marie Antoinette.

It’s a title that could be given to any of Liang’s recent collections, which feature a multitude of ruffles, ribbons, and bows—a dress from her Fall 2026 show was made entirely of the latter. One logo for her eponymous brand, which she founded in 2014 after graduating from Parsons, is a bright-pink bow. From her store on Orchard Street, not far from her family’s Cantonese restaurant, Congee Village, she’s sold bow-shaped earrings, leather bags with bows, bow-adorned puffer jackets (for humans and dogs), and hair bows of every ilk. Last year, partnering with Gap, she put bows on hoodies, trenchcoats, and jeans. She’s also teamed up with Beats by Dre for bow-patterned headphones, and with the Japanese brand Subu for beribboned pink slippers. Collectively, her designs call to mind the 2011 “Portlandia” sketch “Put a Bird on It!”—only with a different “B” word.

In 2023, social media pronounced Liang the leader of a “great bow-pocalypse.” The trend was so prolific that, in September of that year, a headline in the Times asked, “Have We Officially Reached Peak Ribbon?”

As the Frick’s “Ruffles & Ribbons” proves, there is no such thing. Organized by the curatorial fellow Yifu Liu, the show has trimmings in just about every frame. The idea was to lure visitors in with notions of decadence and frills, and then force them to confront the harsh realities of imperialism, colonialism, and the relentlessness of the fashion cycle. “Even the simplest, most frivolous fashions carry all these histories with them,” Liu said. “We named it ‘Ruffles & Ribbons’ kind of as a subversion. We made it so cute and so delicious. But, when you look at these images and you read the captions, you realize, Oh, these are historically significant works of art.”

The first plate depicts the world’s earliest bow-fluencer, Marie Antoinette. In it, she wears an elaborate red court gown with a wide hoop. In the second, a woman wears a chemise à la reine, a style of white dress the Queen popularized “that looks like what you’re wearing,” Liu said, pointing at Liang, who had on a white poplin baby-doll dress, with ribbons embroidered on the sleeves, and tulip-print leggings—both of her own design. Liu was wearing a black blazer, starched white culottes, and black oxfords.

Liang, a longtime follower of Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola’s 2006 bio-pic is one of her favorite movies), was eager to learn more about the Queen’s shopping habits. She oohed when Liu explained that ruffles were originally used to hide seams, which were left mostly unfixed so that expensive fabric could be reused when trends inevitably changed, and aahed at the sight of a lévite, an Ottoman-inspired open-front gown that was tied at the waist with a ribbon, which Marie Antoinette wore when she was pregnant.

With a seemingly unlimited clothing budget and access to goods and ideas from around the globe, the Queen had a vast, ever-evolving wardrobe. This meant that the public was constantly racing to keep up, turning to fashion plates to see, for example, whether they should style their curls in tall, “Bridgerton”-esque poufs or let them dangle from under a hat. Each year, Marie Antoinette ordered up to three hundred new gowns, and the winds changed accordingly.

“You’ve kind of killed the romance for me,” Liang said at the end of the tour. “Fashion nowadays is so fast—nobody has any time to think. You just have to put stuff out. I always thought that in Marie Antoinette’s day, you bought what you liked. But even she, or the women of that era, felt the pressure.” She sighed. “And there wasn’t even Instagram.”

Liu nodded: “It was intensely stressful for them.” Even worse, he added, “a lot of these women had gout.”

In a pink, chandeliered room in the Gilded Age mansion of a dead steel magnate, the past and present melded in a manner that was both unsettling and affirming. (Everyone knows what happened to Marie Antoinette.) In many ways, Liang felt validated. “The thing about ribbons and bows—do you ever get tired of them? I still get excited when I see a bow in a painting.”

At the end of the visit, an employee who wore bow-shaped earrings pointed out a wooden chest with gilded detailing that had belonged to Marie Antoinette. Liang bent down to examine it. “Look!” she said, pointing to a motif in the center. “A bow.” ♦