Commentary Culture Investigations

President Trump has removed some liabilities from his cabinet, but he could stand to lose a few more.

On the most recent episode, Eric Eggers admits to misplacing his keys. We all misplace things. But not all of us keep classified documents in a box in the garage. President Joe Biden did.

Two things are worth remembering when you read about the long fight to elect a House Speaker. First, the dissenters were a mixed bag of principled conservatives and publicity hounds. Second, some good came out of the repeated voting to select Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as the new leader of the House. On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers explore the positive things that came from the chaos.

On our most recent podcast, Peter and Eric introduce you to two unlikely muckrakers who take local corruption very seriously. And there are about 560 former officials in Illinois who have seen the business end of that seriousness.

On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, Peter and Eric shake off some holiday crud and plunge back into Washington crud. They start by breathing in the sooty exhaust of the Omnibus.

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Idaho Statesman. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

At an elementary school in southwest Boise, Idaho, in the fall of 2020, children in pre-K went to their recess on the playground, laughing and climbing ladders to reach the slide. One 3-year-old boy sat on the sidelines.

The loose woodchips prevented the boy, who uses a wheelchair, from joining his classmates. There were no swings he could use or textured panels or blocks he could play with. The only student in the class who used a medical stroller, he was relegated to watching his classmates play as a staff member stood with him.

Another year, he often spent recess inside his classroom.

“It was heartbreaking,” said his dad, Grant Schlink, at a neighborhood park where he pushed his son laying back on a swing made of a large circular disk that curved up on the sides. The boy, now 8, sported sunglasses and Converse shoes. The Schlinks requested that their child’s name not be used to protect his privacy.

The playgrounds at Silver Sage Elementary excluded children like Schlink’s son, even though they had been updated by the West Ada School District in 2016 — decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act required new construction to be fully accessible to all students.

The Schlinks reached out to the school asking for help. The district told them in 2022 that improvements were in the pipeline, the boy’s mom, Stephanie Schlink, said. But at some point, communication stalled, she said. Another year passed.

“I finally was just like, ‘OK, they’re not going to do anything,’” Stephanie Schlink told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. “‘F this, I’m going hard.’” In 2023, she filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Education, the agency that investigates complaints over discrimination against people with disabilities in schools. The West Ada School District said in an email it is committed to “safe and equitable access” and that it is making progress toward that goal.

Like Silver Sage Elementary, many schools in Idaho struggle to meet the standards laid out under the law. In 2023, nearly 70 superintendents told the Statesman and ProPublica that accessibility for people with disabilities was a concern in at least one of their buildings. In many cases, school leaders said, they would need major renovations to make those schools inclusive to students with disabilities.

Silver Sage Elementary updated its playgrounds in 2016, but still had elements, like wood chips, that excluded some children who use wheelchairs or walkers.

(Sarah Miller/Idaho Statesman)

Over a year after the state approved $2 billion to help schools repair and replace their aging buildings, around three dozen superintendents told the Statesman and ProPublica that their buildings are still not fully accessible, while others said they had workarounds that were not ideal. Many pointed to funding as a continued challenge. Lawmakers cited the Statesman and ProPublica’s previous reporting last year when they approved the $2 billion investment, while acknowledging the funds still wouldn’t solve all of the issues.

Many of the problems the Statesman and ProPublica heard from superintendents had disproportionate impacts on students with disabilities. One of the most common was broken or outdated HVAC systems, often an expensive upgrade; freezing or overheated classrooms can be especially hard on students who can’t regulate their body temperatures, such as children with Down syndrome.

“Unfortunately there is not nearly enough for us to do any type of major construction that would make our building more ADA compliant particularly in such a rural part of North Idaho where construction is very expensive,” Megan Sindt, the superintendent of the Avery School District, a K-8 district of just about 10 students, said in an email. The North Idaho school, built in 1918, has stairs to the second floor, where most classes are held.

It’s far from the only district trying to navigate these challenges. Despite a historic funding push by the state, that’s not likely to change.

Why $2 Billion Isn’t Enough
In January 2024, in his State of the State address, Gov. Brad Little pulled up photos from deteriorating school buildings that had appeared in a Statesman and ProPublica investigation. He highlighted the reporting that showed how school districts’ limited ability to fund facility upgrades left students learning in schools with leaky ceilings, failing plumbing and freezing classrooms. Months later, lawmakers approved the $2 billion and celebrated it as the largest investment in school buildings in state history.

In reality, that money will do little to help schools address the needs of students with disabilities. As it is, many districts received only enough to make a few repairs; the smallest ones, which often have significant needs, got less than $1 million to upgrade schools.

Before the state investment, we surveyed superintendents in all districts and heard back from 91%, more than half of whom cited ADA issues in their schools, including multifloor buildings with no elevators or elevators that often don’t work, inaccessible playgrounds and restrooms, plus uneven sidewalks that were difficult to navigate with wheelchairs. We followed up with them again this year. Some superintendents said they planned to use money they received to make accessibility improvements. A handful said they have since been able to fully address such issues but many others said the money wouldn’t be enough to do so.

Small, rural districts didn’t get enough money from the bill to retrofit older buildings “without completely exhausting the funds,” Superintendent Brian Lee of the Nezperce School District in North Idaho said.

“If we don’t have a functional roof, heat, and functional classrooms, electrical, and plumbing, ADA compliance is a non-issue because we can’t have school,” he said in an email. “Most older buildings are not architecturally capable of making small changes to meet ADA compliance.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act, which was updated in 2010, requires schools to provide equal access to programs for students with disabilities and to eliminate barriers to their learning. But schools have some leeway in physical alterations if their buildings were constructed before certain standards were in effect. Schools can still comply with the law without altering their buildings by providing reasonable modifications for students and ensuring equal access. For example, if a library is on the second floor, a school can bring books to a floor that students with disabilities can access.

In struggling to make their schools fully accessible, Idaho is not alone. A 2020 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found most schools had some kind of physical barrier, like steep ramps or door handles that were difficult to use, and noted that schools needed more guidance in interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act. There’s little enforcement by the federal government or the state to ensure districts follow the law, and little recourse for families when their children are excluded.

Districts have contingency plans for when they can’t make a school accessible. In larger districts, students can be bused to different schools. In other cases, districts will move classrooms to the main floor if a student enrolled in those courses can’t use stairs.

But in some cases, the infrastructure simply prevents students from being able to participate in school in the same way as their peers. At least 10 districts in Idaho said in 2023 that their bathrooms, gyms and cafeterias weren’t all accessible. Students in those schools have been unable to get their meals at lunch, to make it to classes on different floors or even to attend their neighborhood school. Administrators in three districts, like West Ada, said they don’t have playgrounds that all students are able to use.

At an elementary school in Salmon in remote Central Idaho, a narrow stairway with no wheelchair ramp is the only access to the school cafeteria line. Students who are unable to navigate the stairs must rely on others to get their food for them. The district passed a bond last year after about a dozen failed attempts to build a new school.

(Sarah Miller/Idaho Statesman)

“When you have old buildings, it’s sometimes difficult to do what is required to meet all of those expectations because they just weren’t built with some of those things in mind,” said Anthony Butler, the superintendent of the Cambridge School District, two hours north of Boise. Butler said the district has an old gym with inaccessible restrooms, and seating can be challenging, but it has made a number of other updates to make its other buildings more inclusive for students with disabilities.

State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield said the state doesn’t track whether buildings are accessible. But she said the state does care about students with disabilities.

“It’s certainly not a lack of desire or commitment to serve students,” she said. “We don’t want the system to exclude a student from enjoying the same experience of any other students because they can’t be with friends at lunch, or for no other reason than, there isn’t a way for them to get to that cafeteria in the basement.” Her office said she encourages districts to make a plan that “prioritizes facilities needs.”

Jeremy Maxand, executive director of LINC Idaho, an organization that helps people with disabilities live independently, said these kinds of issues that can seem less important, like having accessible playgrounds, can affect how students with disabilities are viewed by others and how they see themselves. Students with disabilities “are at a distinct disadvantage when you’re supposed to be getting the playing field level so you have an equal opportunity, like everybody else, to succeed or fail,” Maxand said.

No Way Down
In the Pocatello-Chubbuck School District, Mariah Larkins, a sophomore at the time, approached the doors leading to the elevator on the second floor of her high school in September 2022, according to an account laid out in a 2024 lawsuit. There, she saw a sign that read: “closed for lunch.” The girl has a disorder that causes debilitating bone spurs throughout her body, requiring frequent operations and forcing her to use crutches or wheelchairs at times. She called the front office, but no one answered, according to the lawsuit, which is ongoing. She called her mom, who said she’d come to the school right away.

Trapped upstairs and embarrassed, she tried to traverse the stairs with her crutches in hand. Larkins’ mom met her daughter outside the school, “alone, in pain” and crying, the lawsuit read. The family alleged that from Larkins’ first day of school, she was met with an elevator that didn’t yet work, excluded from classes and physically and emotionally harmed.

It was one of several times the student, who has since graduated, risked injury or was separated from her peers during her years at the school, according to the complaint. The district had installed an elevator in the building before the girl started high school, but it didn’t go to the basement, where the cafeteria and some classes were located. The lawsuit said the district did not move those classes to an accessible location.

Larkins couldn’t get to the cafeteria and on one day couldn’t get lunch at all. She also fell behind in classes and struggled with her mental health, her family said in the lawsuit. Her anxiety and depression worsened as she sat in rooms alone while her classmates were educated downstairs.

Aaron Bergman, Larkins’ attorney, said Larkins, who is now 18, cares about improving access for other children in school now.

“This was a very difficult time in her life that did not need to be as difficult,” he told the publications. “We expect Domino’s to do it for people in their restrooms. I think we can expect school districts to do it for schools, for kids in their schools.”

Pocatello High School was first built over a century ago, long before the ADA was enacted. In 2021, the district completed major construction at the school. Part of that, as required by law, included making the school accessible.

But even at the time, officials acknowledged students still wouldn’t be able to navigate the whole building. In an email earlier this month, Pocatello spokesperson Courtney Fisher said extending the elevator to the basement would have required “significant structural changes,” since storm water drains and sewage pipes run directly underneath the new elevator.

Larkins’ mom asked the district to do more, but little changed, the lawsuit said. Just before her daughter’s senior year, she took it to the courts.

“Because M.L. is disabled, and for no other reason, she received much less than her peers,” the family’s attorney said in the lawsuit, which identifies Larkins only by her initials.

The Pocatello school district declined to comment on pending litigation, but in court filings, denied many of the allegations in the lawsuit. On its accessibility issues in general, the district said it’s addressing some of those problems but, with the lack of funding, can’t make every building fully compliant with current standards.

“The cost of retrofitting our current buildings to full compliance is prohibitive, if not impossible, and that reality does limit our ability to provide every service in every building,” Fisher said in an email. “School districts across Idaho — and across the nation — are grappling with the same issue: aging facilities that were built long before ADA requirements, limited resources to modernize them, and the significant costs associated with comprehensive retrofits.”

Interviews with superintendents across the state revealed similar problems. In 2017, parents sued the Oneida School District, in southeast Idaho, after their children struggled for years to navigate an old building with no elevator and at times had to crawl up stairs and got injured. In 2019, a judge ruled against the district, requiring it to pay two families $1.2 million. It wasn’t until 2023 that the district passed a bond to build a new school.

In West Ada, the Schlinks’ son spent years on the sidelines before the district agreed to address their concerns.

On a warm day in September, Schlink’s son crawled on the squishy, rubber surface of the large playground near their house. The playground was built to be inclusive of children with mobility challenges, according to the city of Boise, describing it as one of the “most unique playgrounds” in the system.

On the side sat his wheelchair with wheels featuring Lilo and Stitch decals.

At his school down the road, the playground was renovated earlier this year. Before the Office for Civil Rights had completed its investigation, the district agreed to a voluntary resolution to make its playgrounds more accessible. It was the second time in as many years that the agency responded to a complaint about playgrounds at West Ada schools and forced change, according to resolutions posted on the federal government’s website. West Ada said the district has “met OCR standards” at Silver Sage. In addition to updating the playground, it said it brought the parking lot and sidewalks into compliance. Next summer, the district plans to update the second playground at the school. The district said it couldn’t comment on why the playgrounds weren’t made accessible in 2016 because it was a decision made by previous district leadership.

President Donald Trump’s administration has pushed to largely gut the civil rights office, creating uncertainty around whether it will remain an effective resource for families. The administration has argued that cuts to the department will give “parents and states control over their children’s education” and relieve taxpayers from “progressive social experiments and obsolete programs.”

But for the Schlinks’ son, it made a big difference. This is the first year he can participate in recess.

A playground at Silver Sage Elementary School was recently renovated (first image). The school upgraded from woodchips on one of its playgrounds (second image) to artificial grass (third image). While the Schlinks’ son can use a wheelchair on this surface, it gets too hot in the sun for him to crawl on, according to his mother. The city of Boise used a squishy, rubber surface at a playground it built to be inclusive of all kids (fourth image).

(Sarah Miller/Idaho Statesman)

The updates aren’t perfect. The ground is now a material he can use a wheelchair on, but it gets too hot in the sun for him to crawl around, his mother, Stephanie Schlink, said. The structures don’t include accessible swings or merry-go-rounds, or any kind of enrichment such as textured panels or chimes for kids with disabilities.

Still, after years of watching their son be relegated to the side at recess, “there’s a clear indicator that he is really enjoying himself and happy at school now,” she said. When she picked her son up from school last month, his classmates ran up to her to share how they played with him. He’s social and loves outings and being around people, Stephanie Schlink said.

Finally, she said, he’s part of the class.

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

13 Oktober lalu Genting Bhd mengemukakan tawaran pengambilalihan sukarela bersyarat bernilai RM6.74 bilion untuk mengambil alih sepenuhnya Genting

by Rebecca Lopez and Jason Trahan, WFAA

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with WFAA and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

The year before President Donald Trump announced he was sending National Guard troops and federal agents into major cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago, declaring crime out of control, a Dallas nonprofit made a similar case for putting more police on the streets.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said at an Aug. 11 press conference, announcing the unprecedented federal takeover of the Washington police force and the deployment of the National Guard to the city.

A year earlier, a man named Pete Marocco told Dallas City Council members that Dallas was descending into comparable anarchy.

“We cannot wait until Dallas looks like other degenerate cities that have made irreversible mistakes, devaluing their police force and destroying their city center,” said Marocco, who would go on to briefly lead the U.S. Agency for International Development under Trump.

At that time, Marocco was speaking as the executive director of a nonprofit called Dallas HERO, whose leaders wanted voters to pass propositions that would radically overhaul the city’s charter. One of them, a ballot measure known as Proposition U, would force Dallas to grow its police force to 4,000 officers, and significantly raise their starting pay, in order to address the kind of lawlessness Marocco claimed the city was experiencing.

Voters went on to narrowly pass the proposition in the same November election that put Trump back in the Oval Office. They also approved another “citizen enforcement” measure Dallas HERO got onto the ballot, Proposition S, which gave residents the right to more easily sue the city to block policies and have them declared unlawful by stripping Dallas of its immunity from litigation. The measure makes Dallas the first city in the country to lose its governmental immunity, legal experts said.

Few people in Dallas dispute that more police are needed; 911 call response times have increased in recent years, and growing the department’s size has been a goal of mayors, City Council members and police chiefs for decades. But violent crime here, as elsewhere nationally, is trending downward despite the growing claims by Trump and other leaders that certain cities are incapable of governing or policing themselves.

“We’re seeing the national government going into Washington and making noises about going into other cities — we’re talking about blue cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland, maybe New York,” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who studies outside influences on city governments.

But what happened in Dallas last fall, he said, follows a different pattern from these federal or state government takeovers.

“It’s coming up from within the city,” he said. “The state isn’t imposing this; local voters have.”

Now, almost a year after voters approved these measures in Dallas, WFAA set out to understand how the Dallas HERO measures came to pass, look into the often misleading statements about violent crime that the group made to voters and explore the long-term effects of these changes.

Already, the city is feeling the effects of the two Dallas HERO-backed propositions voters passed on that November ballot.

In June, the Dallas City Council voted to change its police-hiring standards, eliminating its college credit requirement in an effort to hire more officers. Critics say lowering standards to boost hiring can lead to less-qualified officers patrolling the streets.

In September, the City Council approved a new budget for next fiscal year. It includes cuts to popular libraries and city pools and eliminates some city jobs, but adds money for 350 new police officers — still far short of the nearly 800 needed to reach the 4,000-officer minimum mandated by Proposition U, which had no timeline for compliance.

And earlier this year, a Dallas couple became the first known litigants against the city to cite Proposition S, the measure that eliminated the city’s governmental immunity, in a lawsuit over construction of a church game court. The couple initiated the lawsuit before Proposition S was passed but filed motions citing the city’s lack of immunity in March. The city of Dallas said in court that the proposition is unconstitutional but declined to comment about the lawsuit. The lawsuit, which is still pending, has not been previously reported.

All of this has locals, including local law enforcement, concerned.

One of the most vocal critics of the HERO initiative is Frederick Frazier, a Trump-endorsed former state lawmaker who spent nearly 30 years as a Dallas police officer. He asked a question many others have had in the course of WFAA’s reporting: Are Dallas HERO’s local efforts a precursor to similar changes in other cities?

“Are you trying to build a better department? Or are you trying to destroy a city?” Frazier said. “I want to know: Are we the experiment?”

Pete Marocco stands beside boxes of signatures used to get the Dallas HERO propositions, aimed at changing the Dallas city charter, on the November 2024 ballot.

(WFAA)

Dallas Violent Crime Down
This summer, Dallas-area hotelier and GOP megadonor Monty Bennett joined a conversation on X Spaces to discuss Dallas HERO’s efforts.

“Every American city in this country of any size is a disaster,” Bennett said in that recorded audio discussion, “and it’s terrible.”

Last year, Bennett confirmed to WFAA that he helped fund the group, formed in 2023. But because it is a nonprofit organization, it’s not required to disclose its donor lists, so it’s unclear how much of its $3 million in donations in 2023 and 2024 came from him. Bennett declined to answer WFAA’s questions about how much he contributed to the group, but his office did provide a copy of the organization’s 2024 990 tax form.

Both before the November election and after, Bennett — who has contributed money to Trump’s presidential campaign and to local conservative political action committees advocating for school vouchers — pushed HERO’s message that Dallas, in particular downtown Dallas, is a dangerous place, frequently via his conservative online news site The Dallas Express.

Bennett lives in Highland Park, an affluent community that’s surrounded by Dallas but boasts its own city government and police force. But the headquarters of his hotel company, Ashford Inc., is within the city limits, on Dallas’ north side, which historically has much lower crime than other parts of the city.

His messaging fits an idea that conservatives have increasingly pushed. Trump, in announcing his 2024 campaign for president, referred to the “blood-soaked streets of our once great cities,” calling them “cesspools of violent crimes.”

A group called Save Austin Now tried unsuccessfully in 2021 to convince voters in that city to pass an ordinance forcing it to hire hundreds more police officers.

Bennett later met with Matt Mackowiak, a longtime Austin-based Republican strategist who co-founded Save Austin Now. Mackowiak said he spoke to Bennett about Dallas HERO’s messaging and how to collect enough signatures to get its propositions on the November 2024 ballot.

A spokesperson for Bennett told WFAA that Dallas HERO’s efforts were not modeled after Save Austin Now and that Bennett is not affiliated with the Austin group.

According to city police statistics during the 2021 Austin campaign, violent crime rates in that city were up by 5% compared with 2020, although property crime overall was down in 2021 compared with 2020.

In Dallas, however, violent crime is on track to go down for a fifth year in a row. Last year, Dallas had one of its lowest homicide rates in decades, 14 per 100,000 residents, down from 2023’s rate of 19 per 100,000.

Jay Coons, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, said Dallas voters in November responded strongly to perceptions about crime — regardless of whether it’s actually declining or on the rise.

“Let’s face it: Fear sells,” Coons said. “If you want people to do something, if you can instill fear, that’s a very powerful motivator.”

But that fear isn’t justified in Dallas, said former interim police Chief Mike Igo.

“To the point of crime is out of control?” Igo said. “It’s not.”

Igo and Frazier are among the unusual collection of voices who opposed the Dallas HERO propositions. The Dallas Police Association, which represents thousands of officers, spoke out against the measures, calling them “contrived by a small group of people who do not live in Dallas, with no open dialogue.” The association’s leaders argued the propositions would affect its ability to negotiate pay raises for all of its officers and had questions about the department’s ability to train so many new officers while retaining current ones. Former police chiefs, all 14 of Dallas’ City Council members at the time, nearly all of the city’s prominent civic and business groups, and at least four former Dallas mayors publicly opposed the measures as well.

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, who switched from the Democratic to the Republican party in 2023, lauded HERO’s efforts but still urged voters to reject the propositions.

“Their policy language is deeply flawed, and they would create more problems for the city than they would solve,” Johnson and Cara Mendelsohn, one of the more conservative Dallas City Council members, wrote in an October 2024 op-ed in The Dallas Morning News.

Bennett, who declined an interview request for this story but answered a few questions via email, said he was disappointed in their positions on the measures.

Opponents to the propositions Dallas HERO pushed warned that shackling the city’s budget to such a huge public safety commitment, while at the same time making Dallas vulnerable to lawsuits, could mean cuts to other critical services.

Bennett, in his recent X Spaces conversation, said hiring hundreds of police is simple, though experts have told WFAA it is not.

He also argued that building a new Dallas police academy, which has been in the planning stages for years, is not necessary. He suggested the department instead raise its pay rates in order to hire back officers it had trained but lost to other departments.

Hiring back officers who’ve left for other departments, or recruiting from other departments in general (a practice called lateral hiring that’s regularly employed among police recruiters in Fort Worth, Dallas and other cities across Texas), can indeed be an effective hiring tool, said a police official who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak for the department. But those hires account for only a fraction of the new officers brought on every year. And, after serving in smaller departments, some officers may learn they prefer the slower pace afforded by those jobs, the official said.

Bennett said in an email that the city could hire more officers if it raised their salaries. “The solution to hiring more police officers is to pay them better,” Bennett wrote. “It’s no more complicated than that. Pay them what they’re worth.” He didn’t explain how he thought the city would budget for those increases.

Hiring more police officers has been a goal of the Dallas Police Department for more than two decades, Frazier said. But, he argued, the city doesn’t have enough field trainers, cars or physical spaces to accommodate so many new officers joining its ranks in such a short period of time.

“I would say that would be very difficult,” Frazier said. “I’ve heard a lot of folks say that — ‘We could fix you in a minute.’ No one’s done it.”

The new city budget, which took effect Oct. 1, increased the police department’s minimum starting pay, raising it from about $75,000 to more than $81,000 annually. But that still falls thousands of dollars short of several smaller suburban departments in the area.

According to city reports, DPD had 3,215 officers as of June. The city manager’s goal is to gradually increase that number — but at the current rate, she said, the department won’t reach HERO’s 4,000-officer demand until around 2029.

“It’s a balancing act,” City Manager Kim Tolbert told WFAA during a recent extended sitdown when asked about the impact of the HERO amendments on the budget. “We’re listening, we’re being responsive, but we’re also being good stewards of the public dollar.”

In an email, Bennett wrote, “Government will always blame imposed outside requirements when it has to curb its profligate spending.”

Frederick Frazier, a Republican former state lawmaker and Dallas police veteran, is a vocal critic of the HERO initiative.

(WFAA)

Who Leads Dallas HERO?
WFAA has tried to better understand not just why Dallas HERO’s efforts were successful in the city, but also the motivations of the people behind the initiative. The group bills itself as bipartisan, but at least some of its current and former leaders and associates, like Bennett and Marocco, have championed conservative interests.

HERO’s founding president, Stefani Carter, is a Republican former state representative who is now the lead director on the board of Braemar Hotels & Resorts, a real estate investment trust focused on investing in luxury hotels and resorts. Bennett is Braemar’s founder and chair of its board. (Braemar is for sale, and Carter’s fate on its board is unclear; she did not respond to questions about her status or about the Dallas HERO initiative.)

HERO’s attorney, Art Martinez de Vara, is a municipal lawyer, a historian and the mayor of a small town near San Antonio called Von Ormy, which he helped to incorporate almost 20 years ago as a so-called “liberty city,” operating with minimal levels of government oversight but facing myriad issues including lack of a sewer system. He declined to speak to WFAA about the propositions, citing anticipated litigation.

During the fall campaign to pass the propositions, Marocco led Dallas HERO as its executive director while living in University Park, a self-governed suburban enclave nestled inside Dallas similar to where Bennett calls home. Dallas HERO told WFAA Marocco is no longer with the organization. Trump later tapped Marocco to run USAID, where he wrote the cable ordering a freeze on all U.S. foreign and humanitarian aid, resulting in furloughs and layoffs across the agency.

Marocco did not respond to the news organization’s efforts to reach him.

The man who replaced Marocco in early February as HERO’s executive director, Damien LeVeck, is a horror film director whose social media account Dallas En Fuego trolls city officials with what he refers to as “spicy videos & memes.” He also sells branded merchandise, including a T-shirt with a picture of a Dallas City Council member he often criticizes.

“Show your support for combatting Dallas municipal tyranny (and stupidity) with our great merchandise,” the language on his merch site reads.

All refused to speak with WFAA on camera.

LeVeck provided a statement, on behalf of HERO, that read, in part: “The HERO amendments … decisively passed by voters last November, will boost public safety by expanding the police force and strengthening government accountability. Residents deserve to feel safe where they live and work, and we are committed to ensuring city leadership upholds the will of the voters.”

Coons, who spent nearly four decades with the Harris County sheriff’s office as a patrol commander before entering academia, said even in a city like Dallas with declining violent crime, people can still be scared into making political decisions.

“Whether crime is rampant and people are being murdered in the streets, or whether it’s an extraordinarily safe place to be, the truth probably is going to be a little bit separate than the individual Dallasite’s perception of what’s going on,” he said.

Voters in the city’s more affluent northern side narrowly voted against the measure, with 49.3% voting in favor, an analysis by ProPublica and WFAA found. But in the south, where crime rates are higher and police response times are longer, 52.9% of voters cast ballots in favor.

Dallas City Council member Carolyn King Arnold, who represents part of southern Dallas and was an outspoken opponent of the HERO amendments, said the organization’s backers exploited her constituents’ frustrations over crime in order to get their measures passed.

“In talking to some who actually voted in the southern sector for this, they told me basically, ‘I just want to see one officer ride through, that’s why I voted for it,’ not understanding the full impact of that amendment,” Arnold said. “It’s always about fear.”

It’s not clear what’s next for the Dallas HERO team.

Since its win in November, the group has taken to social media and spoken at City Council meetings to demand more money be devoted to the police department.

“Crime, homelessness, and property destruction is rampant throughout Dallas,” HERO posted on X on Aug. 19.

Within hours of the City Council passing the coming year’s budget, HERO publicly took issue with it. According to a Sept. 18 statement, the organization said the budget “fails to comply with Proposition U.”

Asked about the city’s argument that the budget meets the proposition requirements, Bennett wrote in an email, “With respect, it just doesn’t seem like this is true.”

LeVeck swore in the organization’s Sept. 18 statement that Dallas HERO will “hold city leaders accountable.”

“Sue them into submission!” one X user wrote in response to that promise.

The organization has already threatened to do so.

In December, HERO, citing Proposition S, the immunity measure, argued that the city isn’t enforcing state laws banning people from sleeping in encampments on public property. In March, the group’s attorney sent a letter to the city threatening to sue it for not hiring police fast enough. The city declined to comment about both incidents.

Frazier said he and other local law enforcement stakeholders remain concerned about Dallas HERO’s efforts. While their actions are abundant, their ultimate goals are murky.

“When you ask that question around,” Frazier said, “no one really knows what the end game is.”

Tanya Eiserer of WFAA contributed reporting, and ProPublica Deputy Data Editor Ryan Little contributed data analysis.

Rebecca Lopez is the senior crime and justice reporter, and Jason Trahan is managing editor of investigations at WFAA-TV in Dallas. Reach them at investigates@wfaa.com.

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Following public outcry, the U.S. Department of Education has restored funding for students who have both hearing and vision loss, about a month after cutting it.

But rather than sending the money directly to the four programs that are part of a national network helping students who are deaf and blind, a condition known as deafblindness, the department has instead rerouted the grants to a different organization that will provide funding for those vulnerable students.

The Trump administration targeted the programs in its attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion; a department spokesperson had cited concerns about “divisive concepts” and “fairness” in explaining the decision to withhold the funding.

ProPublica and other news organizations reported last month on the canceled grants to agencies that serve these students in Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as in five states that are part of a New England consortium.

Programs then appealed to the Education Department to retain their funding, but the appeals were denied. Last week, the National Center on Deafblindness, the parent organization of the agencies that were denied, told the four programs that the Education Department had provided it with additional grant money and the center was passing it on to them.

“This will enable families, schools, and early intervention programs to continue to … meet the unique needs of children who are deafblind,” according to the letter from the organization to the agencies, which was provided to ProPublica. Education Department officials did not respond to questions from ProPublica; automatic email replies cited the government shutdown.

When the funding was canceled, the programs were in the middle of a five-year grant that was expected to continue through September 2028. The funding from the center is only for one year.

“We don’t know what will happen” in future years, said Lisa McConachie of the Oregon DeafBlind Project, which serves 114 students in the state. McConachie said that with uncertain funding, her agency had to cancel a retreat this fall that had been organized for parents to swap medical equipment, share resources and learn about services to help students when they get older. She hopes to reschedule it for the spring.

“It is still a disruption to families,’’ she said. “It creates this mistrust, that you are gone and back and gone and back.”

Oregon’s grant application for its deafblind program, submitted in 2023, included a statement about its commitment to address “inequities, racism, bias” and the marginalization of disability groups, language that was encouraged by the Biden administration. It also attached the strategic plan for Portland Public Schools, where the Oregon DeafBlind Project is headquartered, that mentioned the establishment of a Center for Black Student Excellence — which is unrelated to the deafblind project. The Education Department’s letter said that those initiatives were “in conflict with agency policy and priorities.”

An advocate for deafblind students said he was happy to see the funding restored but called the department’s decision-making “amateurish” and disruptive to students and families. “It is mean-spirited to do this to families and kids and school systems at the beginning of the year when all of these things should be so smooth,” said Maurice Belote, co-chair of the National DeafBlind Coalition, which advocates for legislation that supports deafblind children and young adults.

Grants to the four agencies total about $1 million a year. The department started funding state-level programs to help deafblind students more than 40 years ago in response to the rubella epidemic in the late 1960s. Nationally, there are about 10,000 children and young adults, from infants to 21-year-olds, who are deafblind and more than 1,000 in the eight affected states, according to the National Center on Deafblindness.

While the population is small, it is among the most complex to serve; educators rely on the deafblindness programs for support and training.

Of a sudden, the media has swarmed now-former Democrat and California Congressman Eric Swalwell. 

Over there at The Hill, the headline was as follows: 

DOJ investigating Swalwell over sexual misconduct allegations

Meanwhile, at The Washington Post was this: 

How Eric Swalwell rose to the top of Democratic politics as rumors followed him 

Allies such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Ruben Gallego say they knew nothing about the misconduct allegations, with Gallego saying the congressman led a “double life.”

Notably the opening of The Post story said this: 

When Cheyenne Hunt first arrived on Capitol Hill as a staffer in 2020, several other young women working there warned her privately: Stay away from Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Swalwell could be ‘creepy,’ Hunt said other women told her, especially over social media.

This raises a very obvious question….about the media.

If, as suggested by that reference in The Post, that it was something close to common knowledge on Capitol Hill that Swalwell had this kind of seriously negative reputation? Then where was the media? Where was the Watergate-style Washington Post investigation that involved the media talking to all these women who were dealing with what was apparent common knowledge about Congressman Swalwell?

Suffice to say there was no apparent media interest in following this story. Why? Well the obvious occurs. Swalwell was a Democrat on the rise from the favorite Democrat state of California. You know, California. Home to one-time House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Home to presumptive 2028 Democrat presidential wannabe Governor Gavin Newsom.

Swalwell was part and parcel of all of that Golden Pond of California Democrats. So with all these stories about Swalwell apparent common knowledge on the Hill, well, what else to do for the liberal media than look the other way? As in, move along, move along. Nothing to see here.

As time moves on, a new set of Swalwell headlines have (finally?) started to appear. A sample: 

From the San Francisco Standard: Eric Swalwell scandal: All the investigations raining down on ex-congressman Widespread investigations into the former East Bay representative’s conduct have just begun.
From Politico: House Ethics opens Eric Swalwell investigation 
From The New York Times: Investigation Opened Into Sexual Assault Allegation Against Swalwell
And on….and on and on…go similar headlines now flooding the media. 

Say again: Now.

The obvious question is “where was the media all the time these Swalwell stories were common knowledge with Capital Hill staffers?”

Is the reason there was no flood of Swalwell stories back there because he was a Democrat? A rising star with a serious future down the road? A future star who could be governor? And maybe president someday?

Whatever the reason, the fact of the matter is that the media simply did not do its job in covering Swalwell. 

Which leads to another question.

What else is going on in Washington or in a state government with this or that Democrat politician/office holder that the media has some knowledge of but decides not to report on because, well, he or she is a Democrat. 

No idea. But one can easily suspect that the liberal media has no interest in finding out. 

Imagine that.