2023: A Year In Review
By Juliana Schifferes
Now that 2023 has ended we want to propose a virtual toast to the whistleblowers, everyday heroes and staff who made justice possible as we look back on last year.
1. Changing The Legal Landscape: Government Accountability Project’s Policy Successes
This year we were able to advance whistleblower protection standards both domestically and internationally. In North Carolina we won our legal challenge to the law that criminalized the filming or videotaping of agricultural and other corporate processes. This challenge involved employees concerned about such problems as abuse of animals raised for food production, adulterated meat processing for the food marketplace, or dangerous quality assurance breakdowns that could impact worker or public safety. The federal court at the district and appellate levels declared the law unconstitutional.
Internationally, our leadership at the Conference set up to help implement the United Nations Convention Against Corruption over the last two years led to last week’s resolution for what countries need to do to protect people who report corruption to authorities. In a momentous decision the largest anti-corruption conference ever assembled–consisting of 2000 government representatives from 160 nations, plus 900 attendees from anti-corruption non-government organizations–adopted the resolution that we developed with the Serbian government. This major achievement will now set the international standards for what nations need to enact and enforce to deal with corruption. In some aspects this law’s protections surpass this nation’s whistleblower provisions. Thus, these protections will allow us to hold this nation and other nations to a higher standard of protection for truth-tellers.
2. Whistleblower Denounces Misconduct in Medical Care at the Border
In response to ongoing deaths of noncitizen children detained at the border, in 2020, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) created the Office of the Chief Medical Officer to oversee and expand its contract for medical services across the southwest border with a company called Loyal Source Government Services. Despite this attempt at better oversight of border medical care for noncitizens, a very young child died in CBP custody in May of 2023. Reports have found that the death of 8-year-old Anadith Reyes Alvarez was preventable and caused by Loyal Source inaction.
In November 2023, our client, Mr. Troy Hendrickson, a CBP employee detailed to the Office of the Chief Medical Officer and responsible for reporting deficiencies in Loyal Source’s contract performance to contract officials within the agency, publicly disclosed that for months preceding Anadith’s death he had relayed concerns internally that Loyal Source was undertreating thousands of immigrants despite a 1.5- billion- dollar contract. Mr. Hendrickson’s complaints and pleas for the agency to take corrective oversight action were largely ignored. Instead, contract officials retaliated against Mr. Hendrickson by removing him from his position and preventing him from working on any future CBP medical contracts. Mr. Hendrickson strongly believes that had the agency heeded his warnings, Anadith might still be alive.
Mr. Hendrickson chose to make his disclosure, a letter to Congress, public, because for over a year following his retaliatory removal from his position, he attempted on his own to engage oversight entities to investigate Loyal Source and CBP’s negligence to no avail. With the assistance of the Government Accountability Project, Mr. Hendrickson’s disclosure has now catalyzed Congressional and agency investigations into the CBP medical services contract.
This case is a prime example of the success of the methodology Senior Counsel and Director of Education and Partnerships, Dana Gold, has developed in immigration related cases. With careful attention to the risks and goals of Mr. Hendrickson, navigation of a fraught political landscape, and collaboration with the press and public interest allies, Gold and Immigration Counsel Andrea Meza executed a careful campaign that has not only brought scrutiny to CBP and Loyal Source but has also emboldened other employees to contact Government Accountability Project for similar representation.
3. Root Causes of Noncitizen Child Labor Revealed: Immigration and Food Integrity
In February of 2023, reports emerged that noncitizen children who had migrated to the United States unaccompanied were discovered in situations of unlawful and dangerous child labor across the country, including in meatpacking plants and other components of the domestic food production industry. Recognizing the unique expertise Government Accountability Project could lend to public discourse about this problem, the Immigration and Food Integrity Campaign teams collaborated to write an issue brief highlighting their intersection of work.
For years, the Food Integrity Campaign represented workers in the meat packing industry who decried dangerous conditions for workers including the use of caustic chemicals, airborne hazards, and the rapid pace of machine run line speeds which led to increased worker injuries. Additionally, beginning in 2021, Government Accountability Project began to represent federal employees detailed to emergency operations for unaccompanied minors at the border, primarily in tent camps at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. These detailees blew the whistle on dangerous conditions for children warehoused in remote desert tents and poor case management oversight which led to months-long delays in the release of children, including dozens of children getting “lost” in the system. In September 2022, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees operations for unaccompanied minors, released a report crediting these whistleblower disclosures for spurring the Inspector General’s investigation, and finding both a chilled environment for employees to raise concerns internally, and that case management failures may have resulted in children released to unsafe sponsor situations.
The issue brief produced jointly offers a unique perspective that highlights the oversight gaps whistleblowers have brought to light in both the immigration and food production systems which have created situations ripe for serious dangers—including the exploitation of immigrant youth as reported this year. The connections between systemic problems in two major industries implicate both corporate and government oversight failures—accountability gaps often filled by employee whistleblowers—and demand strategies, outlined in the issue brief, to safely integrate newcomers to the United States and ensure the integrity of our domestic food supply.
4. A Former Foster Youth’s Heroism
In November, testimony by various foster youth and experts in the child welfare field demonstrated the harms of a broken foster care system to a shocked Congressional audience. Misconduct by the foster care system in Georgia included fatally incompetent placement systems that resulted in the death of children, such as the grieving mother of a deceased toddler; eyes turned away from sexual abuse and even sex trafficking; and failures by the Georgia Division of Family & Children Services to address abuse and neglect of children in the foster care system.
We provided expert support to the witnesses called to testify at a hearing presided by Senator Marsha Blackburn and Senator Jon Ossoff, including helping both academic and legal experts, as well as victims of the foster care system, prepare written and oral statements to Congress. One client, a former foster child experienced a series of foster care placements that involved no caring adults, no family arrangements, and being put into solitary confinement while placed in congregate or “behavioral” settings. At age 18, she was manipulated into signing discharge papers to leave foster care, and if not for Brightside Advocacy, a nonprofit supporting neglected and abused children and youth, she might not have been able to share her story of resilience and survival that she bravely shared with Congress with the hope of protecting other foster youth from the adverse treatment she endured in DFCS care.
Another client lost her child after a wrongful arrest that left her child in an unsafe foster care situation. Even after the arrest, the mother could not remove her child back to her or to a safer foster situation. Specifically, one of the caregivers was a methamphetamine user who ultimately murdered the little girl. This mother left Georgia for the first time in her life to share her devastating story with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law in Washington, DC, with the similar hope that her testimony would prevent unnecessary, preventable tragedies like she suffered because of failures of Georgia’s foster care system.
We were honored to work with Senator Ossoff and his staff to support these witnesses whose testimonies will help the Committee advance reforms to ensure that youth in foster care systems around the country receive the care and protection they need and deserve.
5. Saving East Palestine, Ohio
Lesley Pacey, our environmental investigator, knows well that her work is not for the faint of heart. Specifically, she witnessed the incredible horror of seeming Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) seeming indifference toward the suffering of a small Ohio town dealing with ongoing contamination and health impacts of toxic chemicals that were spilled on February 3 when a Norfolk Southern train derailed. Those chemicals, including vinyl chloride and benzene, were purposely burned–forming a toxic plume that traveled many miles impacting residents in neighboring communities.
After a brief evacuation, the EPA claimed the area was safe. But multiple residents insisted otherwise. They reported horrific health symptoms. Norfolk Southern hired contractors to test, but those results are not truly independent and scientists like Stephen Lester of Center for Health & Environmental Justice have criticized the sampling methodologies of certain railroad contractors. This spurred Government Accountability Project to launch an investigation in July into the EPA’s response to the incident. We also provided citizen whistleblower status to Scott Smith, the independent scientist who uncovered significantly elevated levels of dioxins and dioxin-related compounds, or furans, in East Palestine. Smith, who is CEO of U.S. BioSolutions, LLC, said the elevations in the community’s air, water, soil and household furnace filters were notably higher in 30 percent of his East Palestine samples than baseline in unaffected communities.
Additionally, many residents to this day continue to suffer from rashes, difficulty concentrating, headaches, gastric upset, respiratory issues, heavy or irregular menstruation, hair loss, dental decay and even teeth falling out. Local activists and nonprofits are still fighting for answers and are hoping for a disaster or superfund site declaration to provide the financial means for residents to move out of town. That has not happened. “The EPA has been disingenuous about the facts of contamination while residents in East Palestine have become sicker and sicker. The failure of government is reminiscent of how we treated our military servicemen and women who were exposed to the burn pits of the Gulf War,” Smith said.
This David-Goliath battle continued back in Washington as Pacey grappled with an intransigent EPA refusal to grant expedited processing of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made in August regarding East Palestine. The EPA’s denial said that Government Accountability Project failed to prove an imminent risk to the life, health and safety of residents. A protracted legal battle followed, and Government Accountability Project filed a second EPA FOIA request on East Palestine detailing the reasons why expedited processing was needed. EPA approved our latest request for expedited processing saying: “Following careful review of the record and the arguments presented therein, I find that your request provides a sufficient level of detail to support your application. Specifically, while EPA does not endorse your position that there is an imminent threat to the life or safety of the East Palestine residents, you have demonstrated that a lack of expedited treatment could potentially reasonably be expected to pose an imminent threat to the life or safety of individuals in East Palestine.”
EPA has started to provide the requested records and legal work continues to ensure EPA officials provide all the records we requested as timely as possible so we can inform the public about the full scope of dangers following this toxic event.
6. Calling Out The “Citizenship-by-Investment” Program
In October, our Investigator, Zack Kopplin, forged a look into corruption and oligarchy within the Citizenship-by-Investment program in Dominica. Requiring only 100,000 in US dollars and a less-than-thorough background check, Dominica enabled dozens of criminals and oligarchs with hair-raising pasts to gain passports. These passports enabled dual citizenship, and fictitious residencies on the island that enabled them to continue business elsewhere, albeit often in secret, while evading international sanctions or criminal persecution for crimes like racketeering back home. This work raises questions about effective ways to hold the ultrarich accountable in a world that at times provides them with no rules.
Kopplin and many news outlets covered various colorful characters who evaded punishment, some of whom were on the lam. But the implications were more serious than Bonny-and-Clyde stories: widespread corruption makes everyone unsafe, just as “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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Thank you for an excellent year, and here’s to an excellent, forthcoming period of successes in 2024!