Grantees’ Stories

U.S. immigration policies in President Donald Trump’s second term have exacerbated a serious humanitarian crisis – stranding many people in remote, dangerous areas where aid workers are unable to reach them – according to new reporting in The New Humanitarian, with support from the Fund. A team of reporters tracked so-called “reverse migration” by people who were fleeing violence in ...

For a decade, the nonprofit Colibrí Center for Human Rights worked with state agencies and humanitarian organizations to identify migrants whose remains were found along the U.S.-Mexico border. As part of this work, the organization managed a database of DNA samples from families across the U.S. and Latin America, facilitating hundreds of successful identifications. But in 2024, the database itself ...

With support from the Fund, Gabrielle Russon obtained 700 pages of depositions from a civil lawsuit stemming from the Walt Disney Company’s battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in recent years. The dispute arose after Disney leaders spoke out against a state law in Florida restricting discussion of LGBT issues in schools. Depositions of three key Disney executives show that ...

After the Trump Administration created the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, in early 2025, more than 5,800 U.S. Forest Service employees were forced out of their jobs. With support from the Fund, Christine Peterson documented the impact of these cuts on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a 30,000-square-mile are in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. She found ...

The ongoing tariff war between the United States and China has driven up demand for soy produced in Brazil – and record levels of soy production are likely to have a significant environmental impact. A 580-mile railroad through the Amazon has been proposed to support increased soy production, but Indigenous communities and environmental advocates oppose it. With support from the ...

There are thousands of wells around Texas that produce low levels of gas and oil and are leased by companies operating on a shoestring. Different than the problem of non-producing “orphan” wells that have been covered extensively in the media, these low-producing wells are allowed to continue operating unless oil companies spend thousands of dollars to close them. Some ranchers ...

Sahela “Toka Win” Sangrait, who was Mnicoujou Lakota, was killed in 2024, allegedly on an Air Force base in South Dakota – but her friends and family are still fighting for justice. As part of South Dakota Searchlight and ICT’s ongoing series on missing and murdered Indigenous people, which is supported by the Fund, Amelia Schafer probed Sangrait’s case. Friends ...

For a story that aired nationally on NPR, Julia Haney and Elizabeth Santos investigated emotional abuse in college sports. With support from the Fund, they reported that researchers have found that athletes experience emotional abuse – a toxic pattern of verbal attacks, manipulation and/or controlling actions – more than any other form of harm. Yet, while schools and sports organizations ...

With a follow-up grant from the Fund after his initial investigation last year, Luke Mullins reported for Washingtonian Magazine that conditions inside the Psychiatric Institute of Washington are even worse than previously known. Mullins spoke to a former employee at the facility who was sexually assaulted on the job by a patient, for which the federal Occupational Safety and Health ...

For more than a year, reporters at New York Focus and Hell Gate, with support from the Fund, have been reporting on a flood of sexual-abuse lawsuits filed by people held in New York state prisons. The two outlets have filed public-records requests for the personnel records of state prison staff named in the lawsuits and for records of any ...