Tag: propublica

For Black Families in Phoenix, Child Welfare Investigations Are a Constant Threat

Posted on by Scott

by Eli Hager and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, and Hannah Rappleye, NBC News, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Series: Overpolicing Parents

How America’s CPS dragnet ensnares poor families of color

PHOENIX — In 2015, Nydea Richards decided to move her family to the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan area, in search of lower crime and better weather than in her hometown of Milwaukee. She was pregnant at the time.

Before arriving here, Richards, like most Americans, never thought of child protective services as having a major presence in people’s lives, unless they’ve committed some sort of clear-cut child abuse. As a Black mother, she was more concerned about her kids encountering the police someday.

But within months, she found herself being investigated by the Arizona Department of Child Safety — based on the initial result of a drug test administered to her newborn daughter at the hospital, according to DCS case records she shared with ProPublica and NBC News.

It is not hospital policy to test for drugs after all births, but staff told her that she and her child were being screened because she was from out of town, she said. Richards, who tested negative for substances herself, believes the reason was the color of her skin.

DCS then prohibited her from being alone with her baby for five days while a caseworker interrogated her about her marital status, whether she received food stamps and how she usually handles stress, the records show. The investigator also inspected her other six children’s bodies and questioned them for hours about their chores, their meals, their mom’s employment and more.

Then, the department learned that there had been a false positive on the test and deemed the case unfounded, according to the records.

“They never explained or apologized,” Richards said.

Just months later, Richards, a case manager for a behavioral health care company, was investigated again, when she sought medical care after her daughter fell off a couch. That allegation of child maltreatment, too, was unfounded, according to a DCS spokesperson.

The department declined to comment further on the two cases.

Richards now feels intense dread when any of her children have even a minor injury or come down sick, fearing that DCS will show up again if she takes them to the doctor.

And in the years since her own experiences with Arizona’s child welfare system, she said, two of her family members in Phoenix, as well as a neighbor and a client at her job, have also endured these investigations of their parenting. All of them are Black.

From 2015 to 2019, the last full year of federal child welfare statistics available before the pandemic, DCS investigated the family lives of 1 of every 3 Black children in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county and home to Phoenix, according to an analysis by ProPublica and NBC News of data obtained from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect.

Last year, a study published by the National Academy of Sciences used similar data to project that by the time Black children in Maricopa County turn 18, there’s a 63% chance that they will see their parents investigated by child services, the highest rate of any of the 20 largest counties in the nation.

Put another way, more Black children in metro Phoenix will go through a child maltreatment investigation than won’t.

That’s significantly more likely than a Black teen being stopped by the police — an issue that has gained far more attention in recent years — according to multiple studies and interviews with criminal justice data experts.

Over the past year, ProPublica and NBC News have interviewed more than 30 Black parents across the Phoenix region who’ve faced a child welfare case, as well as several of their children and an additional nine teenagers who experienced DCS investigations.

Some of the parents were working single dads or moms, like Richards, many of them living in the historically Black neighborhood of South Phoenix. Some were middle-class couples in the cactus-lined gated communities that dot suburbs like Mesa and Glendale. Some were adoptive parents, or extended family members caring for a child.

Almost all described a system so omnipresent among Black families that it has created a kind of communitywide dread: of that next knock on the door, of that next warrantless search of their home. And many expressed disbelief that it was so easy for the state government to enter their family realm and potentially remove their kids from them.

Black families and their advocates said DCS’ ubiquity does not just take the form of unnecessary investigations in which racial bias may have played a role, as Richards believed happened in her case. It’s also a product, in some cases, of public policy choices in Arizona that take a punitive rather than preventative approach toward Black parents, many of whom are struggling under the legacy of racism, a lack of inherited wealth and a slashed social safety net.

The state — the last in the nation to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday, in 1992 — spends a majority of its welfare budget on DCS investigations rather than on direct assistance to families in need, as ProPublica reported last year.

These priorities are borne out in the data.

Only 2% of children in Maricopa County whose families were accused of child maltreatment from 2015 to 2019 were ultimately determined or suspected by caseworkers to be victims of any form of physical or sexual abuse following an investigation, one of the lowest rates among large counties in the U.S.

But 15% allegedly experienced neglect, a term encompassing parenting problems typically associated with poverty, including a lack of decent housing, child care, food, clothing, medical care or mental health treatment. The category also includes alcohol and drug use, which numerous studies have found are more policed but no more common among Black or low-income people than other groups.

Roughly 20% of Black people in Maricopa County are living below the poverty line, compared to about 13% of all county residents, though having money should not be thought of as a requirement for good parenting, family advocates said.

In an interview, the director of DCS, Mike Faust, said the data used for this article is based on a stretch of time, 2015 through 2019, that began with a caseload crisis for the department. Over that period, he said, the agency made sweeping changes, including improving its intake and risk assessment tools in order to reduce subjective decision-making and unnecessary investigations.

“We’ve gone from what I think most people would describe as the worst-performing child protection agency in the country to one that — I don’t know if you’ll ever have a high-performer child protection agency, given the nature of the work we do — but it’s drastically different,” said Faust, who is white and has led the agency since 2019.

Yet the most recent available federal data through September 2020 shows that while it is true that DCS has reduced the overall number of families it looks into statewide, the decline did not improve — and in fact worsened — the racial disparity.

Although 7,400 fewer white children were the subject of investigations completed from the 2016 to 2020 fiscal years, the number of Black kids whose parents were investigated dropped by less than 100. (Some children did not have a race identified.)

“It didn’t have an immediate impact on just African American children,” Faust acknowledged. “The commitment that I make is to continue to stay engaged as an organization. And trust me, these are some challenging conversations to be in. It’s been difficult. But you’ve got to keep coming back to the table regardless of, at times, that people share that raw emotion.”

Faust, a conservative Republican with a private-sector background, may be out of a job by next spring. The election last month of Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, as Arizona governor likely means that DCS will have a new leader and possibly a new approach to racial disproportionality in the coming years.

In a statement, Joe Wolf, a spokesperson for Hobbs’ transition, pointed out that her career has included stints working with homeless youth and helping to run one of the largest domestic violence shelters in the country, giving her perspective on what affects Arizona’s most vulnerable. Wolf also said that as the governor-elect prepares to take office, her team is developing plans to improve the way the state provides social services, including “addressing the racial disparities that have plagued the system for so long.”

Still, Black community leaders in Phoenix continue to have concerns, saying that it has been challenging to effectively advocate for reforms across both Republican and Democratic administrations.

For one thing, the metro area’s Black community — just 7% of its population — is sparse and spread out compared to that of similarly large U.S. cities. That makes it hard to organize around this common experience to make DCS a pressing political issue and hold its officials accountable.

What’s more, sharing that you were investigated by child services remains more stigmatizing in many families than saying you’ve been stopped by the police.

As a result, some local leaders said it took them a while to realize just how pervasive DCS’ presence is.

Janelle Wood, founder and president/CEO of Phoenix’s Black Mothers Forum, said that when she started her community organization in 2016, she thought its members would mainly be focused on police violence and the criminalization of Black youth, which they have been to an extent. “But what kept coming up at meetings was DCS,” she said, noting that the confidentiality of the gatherings allowed for these conversations. “The most heart-wrenching stories — so many mothers had them.”

Kenneth Smith, principal of a Phoenix alternative high school and a community organizer who works with the local chapter of the NAACP and a group of nonprofits in the city, said he doesn’t usually talk about this issue openly due to the stigma, even though he knows of several people who’ve had DCS cases.

The statistics identified by ProPublica and NBC News, he said, are “like turning on the lights, and all of us are now standing in the room together saying, ‘What? You too?’”

“It Becomes a Generational Curse”

This year, ProPublica and NBC News have been investigatingchild welfare in the U.S.

What reporters have found is that child protective services agencies investigate the home lives of roughly 3.5 million American children each year, opening refrigerators and closets and searching kids’ bodies in almost every case. Yet they determine there was physical or sexual abuse in only about 5% of these investigations.

And while Phoenix is an outlier, the racial disproportionality of this system is a national problem.

Matthew Stewart, the son of the longtime senior pastor of Phoenix’s most prominent Black church, First Institutional Baptist, joined DCS as a case manager in 2009. He did so in part because he had an interest in social justice and youth mentorship from his upbringing.

But in 2018, Stewart, by then a training supervisor, came across an internal agency spreadsheet showing a large racial disparity in Arizona’s foster care population, which mainly consists of children removed from their families following investigations. He hadn’t fully absorbed the problem until then.

He was flooded with shame.

Stewart quit two years later, after deciding he couldn’t achieve meaningful change from within the department. He has since founded a community organization, Our Sister Our Brother, which advocates helping families rather than separating them.

Generational poverty and the resulting trauma within families have been “centuries in the making,” he said. Are parents supposed to believe that after DCS takes custody of their children, “these things will be solved?”

“I simply don’t think DCS is the agency to do this,” he said.

One of the parents whom Stewart has partnered with is Tyra Smith, of nearby Mesa, who now works for his growing group as a parent advocate.

In 2020, Smith left her four sons (triplets who were 7 as well as a 4-year-old) in her apartment for roughly 20 minutes, according to a case report. She said she was going for a walk to calm down after a heated argument by phone with her sister, who then called the police on her.

While she was away, a police officer arrived and called DCS because she wasn’t there. Responding to her alleged lack of supervision and her growing anger about the ensuing encounter, the department removed all of her boys that night, agency records show.

As often happens in the child protection system, this temporary removal led to a broader DCS inquiry into Smith’s mental health history, her troubled relationship with her ex, her marijuana use (which is legal in Arizona) and the tidiness of her home, records show. Based on these concerns, the department kept custody of the boys for a year and a half before returning them.

Smith said that when she was growing up, her own mother underwent such an investigation, and that several of her friends from school, all Black, have since endured one as new parents.

Now, she worries about her sons getting arrested or shot when they are older; when that happens to Black men, she pointed out, the news reports often say, “Oh, their childhood, they were ‘in the system.’”

“It becomes a generational curse,” Smith said.

ProPublica and NBC News presented DCS spokesperson Darren DaRonco with the names and anecdotes of the families described in this article, and he checked with agency leadership and case records and said that all of them were indeed investigated and that there was nothing inaccurate in their recounting of events. Arizona law, he noted, would allow him to clarify or correct anything that is factually wrong.

In interviews, Katherine Guffey, executive consultant to DCS’ director, pointed to additional steps that their team has taken to address the disproportionality issue, especially since the racial justice movement following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

The department, said Guffey, who is white, has been incorporating the feedback of Black employees who formed a disparity committee, including Stewart before he left, helping them to write a charter and create an action plan. Staff have also taken part in a workshop on the systemic causes of racial inequity, as well as an empathy training developed by Arizona State University professors.

Earlier this year, DCS helped convene a confidential two-hour focus group of a dozen Black people to hear how the department’s frequent involvement with families has affected them. The child welfare consulting firm Casey Family Programs has been brought in to hold continuing discussions.

And the agency plans to start a Cultural Brokers program to ensure that a trusted community member of the same race is present upon parents’ contact with caseworkers.

Critics say that while these are positive moves, no proposals have been made that would rein in the fundamental power of this agency, which has a billion-dollar budget, to remove children from their loved ones.

As Stewart put it, “We have a culture that says Black families need to be watched and if we don’t agree with the things that are going on with them, we are the saviors of these children and are charged with punishing their parents.”

Until that fundamental outlook of the child welfare system changes, he said, some of the well-intended steps being taken may amount to just restating or even perpetuating the problem.

Is This Just Arizona?

Arizona was a Confederate territory, whose early leaders had business ties to and a sense of common cause with the slave states of the Deep South. Its first major wave of Black residents were largely recruited to the Phoenix area from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma starting in the 1910s and ’20s, to work in cotton camps.

These families were soon forced to live in South Phoenix via redlining and racial covenants, which blocked them from renting or owning property anywhere else.

Yet despite the injustice of residential segregation, said Rod Grimes, a scholar of Arizona Black history, it did create a sense of Black density in a town that still had few Black people. Once families were able to move, many heading to the suburbs, he said, some of that strength in numbers fell away.

Today, Black residents of metro Phoenix are geographically and therefore politically diffuse. Without either the powerful voting blocs that exist in some parts of the South or the sense of protection of living in a majority-Black urban neighborhood elsewhere, they are more likely to be surrounded by white neighbors, teachers and health care workers whom they fear could call DCS on them, many said in interviews. They are also less likely to have the legislative representation that could conduct oversight of the department or fight for better social services to help prevent child welfare cases.

Even after the November election, Arizona has just two Black state legislators out of 90 — the same number as in 1950.

The result, said Clottee Hammons, an Arizona history expert and the creative director of Emancipation Arts, is a business-oriented white leadership class whom she and other Black Arizonans feel cannot relate to what it is like to raise a Black child, let alone on a low income.

Due to this experiential gap in the halls of power, critics say, the state Legislature rarely addresses concerns specific to Black families, instead focusing on topics of interest to many white voters, like school choice and border security.

Nor have lawmakers created a well-funded, easily accessible statewide system that parents living in poverty (as well as mandated reporters of child neglect, like teachers) can call to get help. Many other states have invested heavily in such services, but in Arizona the main option is to call DCS, which comes with the possibility of family separation attached.

In a statement, DaRonco, the department spokesperson, said of the parents and community members making this criticism, “We share their desire to reduce DCS presence in their homes by creating access to community-based supports that get them what they need without the stress of a DCS encounter.”

Once DCS is involved, the emphasis is on child safety and possibly child removal rather than addressing problems at their root, as reflected in the agency’s funding structure. In fiscal year 2022, the department spent roughly $90 million on group homes and other congregate facilities for foster youth, $99 million on foster care and $278 million on adoptions, compared to just $15 million on prevention efforts and $29 million on in-home services for families themselves.

DaRonco noted that top-line decisions about how DCS spends its funding are made by the Legislature, not the department. He added that the budget includes additional subsidies for parenting programs and substance use treatment, which can lead to family reunification.

Much of the foster care and adoption money comes from the federal government in the form of annual incentives.

“I’m just telling you, people in the community feel like their babies are being sold and trafficked — that’s how easy it feels, and how profitable,” said Roy Dawson, executive director of the nonprofit Arizona Center for African American Resources and a leading Phoenix advocate for racial equity in the child welfare system.

Dawson also said that all the well-meaning foster care nonprofits in Arizona, which exist in part because there is so much funding available for foster care in the state, help perpetuate the system’s vast size and reach.

It’s unclear whether the election of Hobbs as governor will translate into a realignment of budget priorities at DCS, let alone a shift in the anti-poverty agenda at the Legislature, where Republicans continue to hold a majority.

Many families and experts were also skeptical about the possibility of change because of the agency’s long history of claiming to address its problems with race without making much progress.

In 1995, the Arizona Republic published a story about child protective services with the sub-headline, “Blacks are overrepresented in Arizona’s system, study says.” The article went on to say, “Officials haven’t been able to find out why Arizona’s figures are 2.5 times the national average” and that “the state has formed a task force to examine why Blacks are having difficulty.”

In 2008, Arizona reported to the federal government that it was developing an “Eliminating Racial Disproportionality and Disparity” strategy for its child welfare system, which would include technical assistance to evaluate Maricopa County’s data on race as well as a focus group and a training video.

And in a 2014 DCS report, the agency said it was partnering with local churches as part of a racial “Gap Closing Collaborative.”

“I can say with certainty that many DCS and previous CPS administrations have seen this information and been aware of it,” Guffey acknowledged, referring to the former name of the department.

Dana Burns, a mom, musician and founder of the child welfare advocacy organization A Permanent Voice Foundation in South Phoenix, says that DCS’ pervasiveness in the community feels of a piece with a larger anti-Black attitude that she and other parents face in this state, from officials and neighbors alike.

“It’s Arizona,” she said. “It’s an attitude that we were never supposed to be here.”

A White Idea of Family

For many of the Black families who spoke with ProPublica and NBC News, their first interaction with DCS was when an unfamiliar caseworker arrived at their door.

Department data show that its frontline staff are most often white and disproportionately in their 20s, which reflects national trends. Many said in interviews that this was their first or second job out of college, and a large proportion do not have children themselves. Turnover at the agency has also been notoriously high, further lowering the average experience level.

As a result, the typical scenario is a white person with little or no parenting experience entering a Black home and having minimal time, by the nature of the job, to make a judgment as to whether what is going on there is dangerous for kids.

“It felt like we were on display, like they had a white glove on checking everything. And I had to smile and say good morning,” said Tressie King, who lives with her husband Jamel and their 13-year-old adoptive son in the suburb of Chandler. (King was accused of briefly leaving her child, who is autistic, unattended in her car while she ran in to a store, an allegation that case documents show was ruled unfounded but only after several inspections of their home.)

“It felt like they were checking me out, not my child,” she said. “I said if I am being made to feel ashamed, how is that good for the kid?”

Many Black parents also said that if they get combative, precisely because the most precious thing in their life may be about to be taken from them, their anger is too often interpreted as a potential threat.

Sarah Encarnacion, a DCS child safety specialist from 2019 to 2021, said her goal was always to keep families together and for them to feel she was a trusted presence. But she acknowledged that as “a small, petite white woman,” she was “responsible for preparing and educating myself on how to enter this home where I’m such a foreign entity.”

DaRonco, the spokesperson, said that DCS has several initiatives to “change the power dynamic” between its staff and the families they work with. These include holding “team decision making” meetings near the beginning of an investigation, so that parents — and any friends, neighbors, teachers, clergy or others they want with them in the room — can have more of a say in the process.

There are also differences in cultural attitudes toward corporal punishment, which is more common on average in Black families. Many Black parents and children interviewed for this article distinguished between what they called a whooping and abuse, with some parents saying they would rather spank a child, which is legal in Arizona, than risk the child getting out of line and experiencing something far worse at the hands of a police officer.

“Nine times out of 10, parents raise their kids how their parents raised them,” said Richards, the Phoenix mother accused at the hospital, who has since become an advocate around the child welfare issue. “If the state is not agreeing with that way of raising kids, the solution is just to take the children every time? Every generation?”

Richards and many others said DCS’ prevalence can eventually cause insidious damage to relationships between Black parents and their children, who sometimes threaten to call DCS on each other when they’re in normal family disputes.

“That’s messed up,” she said, but the agency has become “so much a part of our lives that it’s a real thing to say.”

In part because of her struggles with the child welfare system, Richards said that she and her family are planning to relocate again, likely leaving Arizona next year.

Stephan Muhammad, a chef who lives in a suburban development in South Phoenix, agrees that no matter what DCS is now doing to address racial disproportionality, its harms linger in Black families like his.

Muhammad had his children taken from him by the department twice; they were placed in foster care, including group homes where they say they experienced repeated violence, for about two years in each case. The first time was based on a neglect allegation that he left his four youngest at home while he picked up his oldest daughter at kindergarten just across a nearby park. The second was for spanking his son, who was nearly 9 at the time, for getting in trouble at school — which the agency said was child abuse, according to Muhammad, his family members and reporting by the Arizona Republic.

In both cases, a judge ultimately returned them home.

“I missed years of my childhood,” said one of his daughters, Sierra, 12, who was separated from her siblings while in state custody. “If I could talk to the head of DCS, I would say don’t take my father from me ever again.”

In an interview at Muhammad’s house, in front of a wall-sized calendar on which one of his children had written in the square of his birthday, “aka Big Head Day,” he said that he obviously has been overjoyed to have them all back. Still, he said he feels a trepidation that thousands of Black parents across Phoenix must be coping with every day: Is he in fact a bad parent?

“It’s impossible not to internalize,” he said. “It’s an attack on who you are as a parent in every way.”

Churches Are Breaking the Law by Endorsing in Elections, Experts Say. The IRS Looks the Other Way.

Posted on by Scott

by Jeremy Schwartz and Jessica Priest

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Six days before a local runoff election last year in Frisco, a prosperous and growing suburb of Dallas, Brandon Burden paced the stage of KingdomLife Church. The pastor told congregants that demonic spirits were operating through members of the City Council.

Grasping his Bible with both hands, Burden said God was working through his North Texas congregation to take the country back to its Christian roots. He lamented that he lacked jurisdiction over the state Capitol, where he had gone during the 2021 Texas legislative session to lobby for conservative priorities like expanded gun rights and a ban on abortion.

“But you know what I got jurisdiction over this morning is an election coming up on Saturday,” Burden told parishioners. “I got a candidate that God wants to win. I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.”

What Burden said that day in May 2021 was a violation of a long-standing federal law barring churches and nonprofits from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, tax law experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Although the provision was mostly uncontroversial for decades after it passed in 1954, it has become a target for both evangelical churches and former President Donald Trump, who vowed to eliminate it.

Burden’s sermon is among those at 18 churches identified by the news organizations over the past two years that appeared to violate the Johnson Amendment, a measure named after its author, former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Some pastors have gone so far as to paint candidates they oppose as demonic.

At one point, churches fretted over losing their tax-exempt status for even unintentional missteps. But the IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen. In fact, the number of apparent violations found by ProPublica and the Tribune, and confirmed by three nonprofit tax law experts, are greater than the total number of churches the federal agency has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade, according to records obtained by the news organizations.

In response to questions, an IRS spokesperson said that the agency “cannot comment on, neither confirm nor deny, investigations in progress, completed in the past nor contemplated.” Asked about enforcement efforts over the past decade, the IRS pointed the news organizations to annual reports that do not contain such information.

Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions.

Trump’s opposition to the law banning political activity by nonprofits “has given some politically-minded evangelical leaders a sense that the Johnson Amendment just isn’t really an issue anymore, and that they can go ahead and campaign for or against candidates or positions from the pulpit,” said David Brockman, a scholar in religion and public policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

Among the violations the newsrooms identified: In January, an Alaska pastor told his congregation that he was voting for a GOP candidate who is aiming to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying the challenger was the “only candidate for Senate that can flat-out preach.” During a May 15 sermon, a pastor in Rocklin, California, asked voters to get behind “a Christian conservative candidate” challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom. And in July, a New Mexico pastor called Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “beyond evil” and “demonic” for supporting abortion access. He urged congregants to “vote her behind right out of office” and challenged the media to call him out for violating the Johnson Amendment.

Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at the University of Indiana-Purdue, who studies Christian nationalism, said the ramping up of political activity by churches could further polarize the country. “It creates hurdles for a healthy, functioning, pluralistic democratic society,” he said. “It’s really hard to overcome.”

The Johnson Amendment does not prohibit churches from inviting political speakers or discussing positions that may seem partisan nor does it restrict voters from making faith-based decisions on who should represent them. But because donations to churches are tax-deductible and because churches don’t have to file financial disclosures with the IRS, without such a rule donors seeking to influence elections could go undetected, said Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“If you pair the ability to wade into partisan politics with a total absence of financial oversight and transparency, you’re essentially creating super PACs that are black holes,” Seidel said.

Churches have long balanced the tightrope of political involvement, and blatant violations have previously been rare. In the 1960s, the IRS investigated complaints that some churches abused their tax-exempt status by distributing literature that was hostile to the election of John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president. And in 2004, the federal agency audited All Saints Episcopal Church in California after a pastor gave an anti-war speech that imagined Jesus talking to presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. The pastor did not endorse a candidate but criticized the Iraq war.

Some conservative groups have argued that Black churches are more politically active than their white evangelical counterparts but are not as heavily scrutinized. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Rev. Jesse L. Jackson was accused of turning Sunday sermons into campaign rallies and using Black churches to raise funds. In response to allegations of illegal campaigning, Jackson said at the time that strict guidelines were followed and denied violating the law.

While some Black churches have crossed the line into political endorsements, the long legacy of political activism in these churches stands in sharp contrast to white evangelical churches, where some pastors argue devout Christians must take control of government positions, said Robert Wuthnow, the former director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.

Wuthnow said long-standing voter outreach efforts inside Black churches, such as Souls to the Polls, which encourages voting on Sundays after church services, largely stay within the boundaries of the law.

“The Black church has been so keenly aware of its marginalized position,” Wuthnow said. “The Black church, historically, was the one place where Black people could mobilize, could organize, could feel that they had some power at the local level. The white evangelical church has power. It’s in office. It’s always had power.”

At the end of his two-hour sermon that May, Burden asserted that his church had a God-given power to choose lawmakers, and he asked others to join him onstage to “secure the gate over the city.”

Burden and a handful of church members crouched down and held on to a rod, at times speaking in tongues. The pastor said intruders such as the mayor, who was not up for reelection last year but who supported one of the candidates in the race for City Council, would be denied access to the gates of the city.

“Now this is bold, but I’m going to say it because I felt it from the Lord. I felt the Lord say, ‘Revoke the mayor’s keys to this gate,’” Burden said. “No more do you have the key to the city. We revoke your key this morning, Mr. Mayor.

“We shut you out of the place of power,” Burden added. “The place of authority and influence.”

Johnson Amendment’s Cold War Roots

Questions about the political involvement of tax-exempt organizations were swirling when Congress ordered an investigation in April 1952 to determine if some foundations were using their money “for un-American and subversive activities.”

Leading the probe was Rep. Gene Cox, a Georgia Democrat who had accused the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among others, of helping alleged Communists or Communist fronts. Cox died during the investigation, and the final report cleared the foundations of wrongdoing.

But a Republican member of the committee argued for additional scrutiny, and in July 1953, Congress established the House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. The committee focused heavily on liberal organizations, but it also investigated nonprofits such as the Facts Forum foundation, which was headed by Texas oilman H.L. Hunt, an ardent supporter of then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who was best known for holding hearings to investigate suspected Communists.

In July 1954, Johnson, who was then a senator, proposed an amendment to the U.S. tax code that would strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status for “intervening” in political campaigns. The amendment sailed through Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Johnson never explained his intent. Opponents of the amendment, as well as some academics, say Johnson was motivated by a desire to undercut conservative foundations such as the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, founded by newspaper magnate Frank Gannett, which painted the Democrat as soft on communism and supported his opponent in the primary election. Others have hypothesized that Johnson was hoping to head off a wider crackdown on nonprofit foundations.

Over the next 40 years, the IRS stripped a handful of religious nonprofits of their tax-exempt status. None were churches.

Then, just four days before the 1992 presidential election, Branch Ministries in New York ran two full-page ads in USA Today and The Washington Times urging voters to reject then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in his challenge to Republican President George H.W. Bush.

The ads proclaimed: “Christian Beware. Do not put the economy ahead of the Ten Commandments.” They asserted that Clinton violated scripture by supporting “abortion on demand,” homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. Clinton, the ads said, was “openly promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.”

The IRS revoked the church’s tax-exempt status, leading to a long legal battle that ended with a U.S. appeals court siding with the federal agency.

The case remains the only publicly known example of the IRS revoking the tax-exempt status of a church because of its political activity in nearly 70 years. The Congressional Research Service said in 2012 that a second church had lost its tax-exempt status, but that its identity “is not clear.”

Citing an increase in allegations of church political activity leading up to the 2004 presidential election between incumbent Bush and Kerry, IRS officials created the Political Activities Compliance Initiative to fast-track investigations.

Over the next four years, the committee investigated scores of churches, including 80 for endorsing candidates from the pulpit, according to IRS reports. But it did not revoke the tax-exempt status of any. Instead, the IRS mostly sent warning letters that agency officials said were effective in dissuading churches from continuing their political activity, asserting that there were no repeat offenders in that period.

In some cases, the IRS initiated audits of churches that could have led to financial penalties. It’s unclear how many did.

In January 2009, a federal court dismissed an auditinto alleged financial improprieties at a Minnesota church whose pastor had supported the congressional campaign of former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota.

The court found that the IRS had not been following its own rules for a decade because it was tasked with notifying churches of their legal rights before any pending audits and was required to have an appropriately high-level official sign off on them. But a 1998 agency reorganization had eliminated the position, leaving lower IRS employees to initiate church investigations.

Following the ruling, the IRS suspended its investigations into church political activity for five years, according to a 2015 Government Accountability Office report.

During the hiatus, a conservative Christian initiative called Pulpit Freedom Sunday flourished. Pastors recorded themselves endorsing candidates or giving political sermons that they believed violated the Johnson Amendment and sent them to the IRS. The goal, according to participants, was to trigger a lawsuit that would lead to the prohibition being ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The IRS never challenged participating churches, and the effort wound down without achieving its aim.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ProPublica and the Tribune last year, the IRS produced a severely redacted spreadsheet indicating the agency had launched inquiries into 16 churches since 2011. IRS officials shielded the results of the probes, and they have declined to answer specific questions.

Despite the agency’s limited enforcement, Trump promised shortly after he took office that he would “totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”

As president, Trump tried unsuccessfully to remove the restrictions on church politicking through a 2017 executive order. The move was largely symbolic because it simply ordered the government not to punish churches differently than it would any other nonprofit, according to a legal filing by the Justice Department.

Eliminating the Johnson Amendment would require congressional or judicial action.

Although the IRS has not discussed its plans, it has taken procedural steps that would enable it to ramp up audits again if it chooses to.

In 2019, more than two decades after eliminating the high-level position needed to sign off on action against churches, the IRS designated the commissioner of the agency’s tax-exempt and government entities division as the “appropriate high-level Treasury official” with the power to initiate a church audit.

But Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney and University of Pittsburgh tax law professor, said he doesn’t read too much into that. “I don’t see any reason to believe that the operation of the IRS has changed significantly.”

The Pulpit and Politics

There is no uniform way to monitor church sermons across the country. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches now post their services online, and ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed dozens of them. Many readers shared sermons with us. (You can do so here.)

Texas’ large evangelical population and history of activism in Black churches makes the state a focal point for debates over political activity, said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“Combine all of that with the increasing competitiveness of Texas elections, and it’s no surprise that more and more Texas churches are taking on a political role,” he said. “Texas is a perfect arena for widespread, religiously motivated political activism.”

The state also has a long history of politically minded pastors, Wuthnow said. Texas evangelical church leaders joined the fight in support of alcohol prohibition a century ago and spearheaded efforts to defeat Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major party, in 1928. In the 1940s, evangelical fundamentalism began to grow in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Today, North Texas remains home to influential pastors such as Robert Jeffress, who leads the First Baptist megachurch in Dallas. Jeffress was one of Trump’s most fervent supporters, appearing at campaign events, defending him on television news shows and stating that he “absolutely” did not regret supporting the former president after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Burden went a step further, urging followers to stock up on food and keep their guns loaded ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. He told parishioners that “prophetic voices” had told him in 2016 that Trump would have eight consecutive years in office.

The Frisco Conservative Coalition board voted to suspend Burden as chair for 30 days after criticism about his remarks.

Burden called his comments “inartful” but claimed he was unfairly targeted for his views. “The establishment media is coming after me,” he saidat the time. “But it is not just about me. People of faith are under attack in this country.”

Since then, Burden has repeatedly preached that the church has been designated by the Lord to decide who should serve in public office and “take dominion” over Frisco.

As the runoff for the Frisco City Council approached last year, Burden supported Jennifer White, a local veterinarian. White had positioned herself as the conservative candidate in the nonpartisan race against Angelia Pelham, a Black human resources executive who had the backing of the Frisco mayor.

White said she wasn’t in attendance during the May 2021 sermon in which Burden called her the “candidate that God wants to win.” She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active.

“I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won’t take a political stance,” White said in an interview. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”

Pelham’s husband, local pastor Dono Pelham, also made a statement that violated the Johnson Amendment by “indirectly intervening” in the campaign, said Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles

In May 2021, Pelham told his church that the race for a seat on the City Council had resulted in a runoff. He acknowledged that his church’s tax-exempt status prevented him from supporting candidates from the pulpit. Then, he added, “but you’ll get the message.”

“It’s been declared for the two candidates who received the most votes, one of which is my wife,” Pelham said. “That’s just facts. That’s just facts. That’s just facts. And so a runoff is coming and every vote counts. Be sure to vote.”

Pelham then asked the congregation: “How did I do? I did all right, didn’t I? You know I wanted to go a little further, but I didn’t do it.”

Angelia Pelham, who co-founded Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship in 2008 with her husband, said the couple tried to avoid violating the Johnson Amendment. Both disagreed that her husband’s mention of her candidacy was a violation.

“I think church and state should remain separate,” Angelia Pelham said in an interview, adding: “But I think there’s a lot of folks in the religious setting that just completely didn’t even consider the line. They erased it completely and lost sight of the Johnson Amendment.”

She declined to discuss Burden’s endorsement of her opponent.

In his sermon the morning after Pelham defeated his chosen candidate, Burden told parishioners that the church’s political involvement would continue.

“So you’re like, but you lost last night? No, we set the stage for the future,” he said, adding “God is uncovering the demonic structure that is in this region.”

“Demonic” Candidate

Most Americans don’t want pastors making endorsements from the pulpit, according to a 2017 survey by the Program for Public Consultation, which is part of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

Of the nearly 2,500 registered voters who were surveyed, 79% opposed getting rid of the Johnson Amendment. Only among Republican evangelical voters did a slight majority — 52% — favor loosening restrictions on church political activity.

But such endorsements are taking place across the country, with some pastors calling for a debate about the Johnson Amendment.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, New Mexico became an island of abortion access for women in Texas and other neighboring states.

The issue raised the stakes in the upcoming Nov. 8 New Mexico governor’s race between incumbent Lujan Grisham, a supporter of abortion rights, and Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti, who advocates limiting access.

“We’re going to fast become the No. 1 abortion place in all of America,” a pastor, Steve Smothermon, said during a July 10 sermon at Legacy Church in Albuquerque, which has an average weekly attendance of more than 10,000 people. Smotherman said the governor was “wicked and evil” and called her “a narcissist.”

“And people think, ‘Why do you say that?’ Because I truly believe it. In fact, she’s beyond evil. It’s demonic,” Smothermon said.

He later added: “Folks, when are we going to get appalled? When are we going to say, ‘Enough is enough’? When are we going to stop saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s a woman’s right to choose’? That’s such a lie.”

Church attendees had a stark choice in the upcoming election, Smothermon said. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti.”

The governor’s campaign declined to comment. Neither Legacy Church, Smothermon nor Ronchetti responded to requests for comment.

The sermon was a “clear violation” of the Johnson Amendment, said Sam Brunson, a Loyola University Chicago law professor. But Smothermon showed no fear of IRS enforcement.

Those who thought he crossed the line were “so stupid,” Smothermon said during the sermon. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

In another example, pastors at a Fort Worth church named Mercy Culture have repeatedly endorsed candidates for local and statewide offices since its founding in 2019.

“Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” the lead pastor, Landon Schott, said in a February sermon about a church member who was running to fill an open state representative seat.

Johnson Amendment rules allow pastors to endorse in their individual capacity, as long as they are not at an official church function, which Schott was.

In other services, Schott challenged critics to complain to the IRS about the church’s support of political candidates and said he wasn’t worried about losing the church’s tax-exempt status.

“If you want it that bad, come and take it. And if you think that we will stop preaching the gospel, speaking truth over taxes, you got another thing coming for you,” Schott said in May.

Schatzline, a member of Mercy Culture, received 65% of the vote in a May 24 runoff against the former mayor of the Dallas suburb of Southlake. He works for a separate nonprofit founded by Heather Schott, a pastor at Mercy Culture and the wife of Landon Schott.

Schatzline said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that Landon Schott, not the church, endorsed him. He added that the church sought legal advice on how to ensure that it was complying with the Johnson Amendment.

“I think prayers can manifest into anything that God wants them to, but I would say that the community rallying behind me as individuals definitely manifested into votes,” Schatzline said.

Mercy Culture also supported Tim O’Hare, a Republican running for Tarrant County judge, this year after he came out against the shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. His opponent in the primary had ordered churches and businesses to temporarily close when she was mayor of Fort Worth.

O’Hare came to prominence as the mayor of suburban Farmers Branch, where he championed a city ordinance to prohibit landlords from renting to immigrants without legal status. A federal court declared the ordinance unconstitutional in 2010 after a legal battle that cost the city $6.6 million.

O’Hare has pledged to hire an election integrity officer to oversee voting and “uncover election fraud.”

“The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Begin to pray for righteous judges in our city,’” Heather Schott said during a Feb. 13 service. “I am believing that Mr. Tim O’Hare is an answered prayer of what we have been petitioning heaven for for the last year and a half.”

Neither Mercy Culture, Landon Schott nor Heather Schott responded to requests for comment. O’Hare also did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.

Schott’s comments were a prohibited endorsement, said Aprill, the emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles.

“It doesn’t say ‘vote for him’ but is still an endorsement,” she said. “There’s no other way to understand the statement that O’Hare has answered prayers for righteous judges.”

Two weeks later, O’Hare won his primary. He faces Deborah Peoples, a Democrat, on Nov. 8.

A New Tactic

On April 18, 2021, a day before early voting began for city council and school board elections across Texas, pastors at churches just miles apart flashed the names of candidates on overhead screens. They told their congregations that local church leaders had gathered to discuss upcoming city and school elections and realized that their members were among those seeking office.

“We’re not endorsing a candidate. We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running,” said Robert Morris, who leads the Gateway megachurch in Southlake and served as a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board.

On the same day, Doug Page gave a similar message less than 5 miles away at First Baptist Grapevine.

“And so what we decided to do is look within our church families and say, ‘Who do we know that’s running for office?’ Now, let me clarify with you. This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you.”

Saying that you are not endorsing a candidate “isn’t like a magic silver bullet that makes it so that you’re not endorsing them,” Brunson said.

The churches’ coordination on messaging across the area is notable, according to University of Notre Dame tax law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, who said he hadn’t before seen churches organizing to share lists of candidates.

“I do think this strategy is new,” said Mayer, who has studied the Johnson Amendment for more than a decade. “I hadn’t heard of that before. It’s quite a sophisticated tactic.”

Eight of the nine candidates mentioned by the pastors won their races.

Mindy McClure, who ran for reelection to the Grapevine-Colleyville school board, said she thought church involvement contributed to her defeat in a June 5, 2021, runoff by about 4 percentage points. Her opponent campaigned on removing critical race theory from district curriculum, while McClure said students “weren’t being indoctrinated in any way, shape or form.” Critical race theory is a college-level academic theory that racism is embedded in legal systems.

McClure said pastors endorsing from the pulpit creates “divisiveness” in the community.

“Just because you attend a different church doesn’t mean that you’re more connected with God,” she said.

Lawrence Swicegood, executive director of Gateway Media, said this month that the church doesn’t endorse candidates but “inform(s) our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.” Page told ProPublica and the Tribune that “these candidates were named for information only.”

Eleven days after responding to ProPublica and the Tribune in October, Morris once again told his church that he was not endorsing any candidates during the last Sunday sermon before early voting. Then, he again displayed the names of specific candidates on a screen and told parishioners to take screenshots with their cellphones.

“We must vote,” he said. “I think we have figured that out in America, that the Christians sat on the sidelines for too long. And then all of a sudden they started teaching our children some pretty mixed up things in the schools. And we had no one to blame but ourselves. So let’s not let that happen. Especially at midterms.”