Sunday Special

An accused man faces an impossible choice in New Orleans. Plus, a new district attorney in Philadelphia sets out to undo the work of those who came before him. From reporters Eve Abrams and Laura Starecheski, and editor Catherine Winter.

A 6-year-old child sleeps in a vacant office building, surrounded by strangers. An infant is taken from his breastfeeding mother. We examine the stories of two families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border and how what happened to them matches up with what the government said was supposed to happen. From Reveal’s Aura Bogado, and Neena Satija (who also works with our partners at The Texas Tribune), Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, along with Casey Miner.

For the 2018 Fall fundraising season, here are three of our favorite Reveal stories from the past year.

There’s a new battlefield in the culture wars: comic books. The alt-right now has gotten in the business, led by a buxom, Confederate flag-waving superhero named Rebel and a white vigilante who turns immigrants over to ICE.

Desperate to have a child, a couple puts its trust in a fertility clinic that promises more than it can deliver. They enter a world where some clinics take unnecessary risks to make them look far more successful than they are in reality. 
From reporter Jonathan Jones and Reveal’s Bernice Yeung and Emily Harris.

Victim compensation funds are supposed to help victims of crime cover lost wages or funeral expenses. But Reveal teamed up with The Marshall Project and discovered that in some states, African Americans are disproportionately hurt by rules on how that money is handed out. Then, Reveal reporters Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter uncover a scheme at a drug rehabilitation facility in the mountains of North Carolina, where clients are being used as a source of free labor.

Some people who live along the Mississippi River are willing to do anything to keep their homes and farms safe from flooding – even if it means inundating their own neighbors. This week, we team up with ProPublica to investigate how rising waters have set off a race to build the highest levee.

This show was originally broadcast February 3, 2018. It’s been ten years since former NASDAQ chairman Bernie Madoff was arrested for committing one of the largest financial crimes in U.S. history. For decades he ran a Ponzi scheme from a secret office in New York, duping thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. Many of them lost everything when the house of cards fell.

African migrants fleeing persecution or seeking opportunity often end up in Libya, where they are tortured and trafficked. Many try to escape to Europe, only to be intercepted at sea and returned to Libya. On this episode of Reveal, we trace their journey and explore how Europe’s immigration policy is helping Libyan warlords and putting migrants at risk. This episode was originally broadcast on May 19, 2018.

In Texas, the foster care system is failing the vulnerable children it’s meant to protect, leaving many without a safe place to live. Foster children often end up on the streets or in jail, which is one of the few places where they can receive treatment services. This week we look into the crisis in foster care, and efforts to fix it.

Deep in the backroads of central Florida, hidden between trees dripping with Spanish moss, sits the campus of an infamous center for the developmentally disabled. Its story shows what can happen when families have nowhere else to find care for their loved ones.

After years of complaints, Carlton Palms is finally being shut down. But its parent company, Bellwether Behavioral Health, is still running group homes across the country, where new allegations have arisen.  

In December 1944, Adolf Hitler surprised the Allies with a secret counterattack through the Ardennes forest, known today as the Battle of the Bulge. In the carnage that followed, there was one incident that top military commanders hoped would be concealed. It’s the story of an American war crime nearly forgotten to history.

Old paint, old pipes and demolition dust often are sources of toxic lead. It’s a poison known to cause neurological damage in children. For adults, new science shows lead exposure increases the risk of heart disease. Reveal investigates the lurking threat from the dust of urban demolitions to the wilds of Wyoming. This episode was originally broadcast March 31, 2018.

President Donald Trump has pledged allegiance to what he calls America’s “energy dominance.” This is good news for the oil and gas industry. We examine what this means for Alaskan villagers coping with climate change, Native American artifacts in Utah and songbirds flying over the U.S.  

This week, we continue our ongoing investigation into what happens to immigrant children after they’re detained by the U.S. government. Our latest story investigates a vacant office building being used by a defense contractor to house children.

Then, we travel to the Gulf Coast to learn why last year was the costliest hurricane season on record. In Houston, we discover that homes flooded by Hurricane Harvey were actually built inside a reservoir.

This week’s episode of Reveal investigates shark fishing in Central America and a U.S.-based seafood company that claims to be a model of sustainability.

We start in the jungles of El Salvador, where reporter Sarah Blaskey and photojournalist Ben Feibleman investigate one of the largest shark-fishing operations in the region. The men who crew these boats are migrants from Vietnam who work under grueling conditions.   

President Donald Trump said he was ending family separation at the border this week. But we’ve stayed on the story, investigating the issues that remain: children being drugged at migrant shelters, asylum-seekers being denied at ports of entry and the problems with Trump’s new detention plan.

Picture an American farmer. Chances are, the farmer you’re imagining is white – more than 9 out of 10 American farmers today are. But historically, African Americans played a huge role in agriculture. The nation’s economy was built largely on black farm labor: in bondage for hundreds of years, followed by a century of sharecropping and tenant farming. In the early 1900s, African American families owned one-seventh of the nation’s farmland, 15 million acres.

Last time we did a show about U.S. immigration policies, listeners texted us with hundreds of questions. This week we answer your questions about immigration.

Baltimore’s police department was already notorious. But this year, eight former police officers were convicted on federal racketeering charges stemming from an FBI investigation. They belonged to an elite task force charged with getting guns off the city’s streets. Instead, the plainclothes cops roamed Baltimore neighborhoods at will, robbing people on the street, breaking into homes to steal money, drugs or guns and planting evidence on their victims. The targets of the Gun Trace Task Force included drug dealers and ordinary citizens.

Some police departments are embracing a set of tactics designed to reduce the use of force – and prevent police shootings. Rather than rushing in aggressively, officers back off, wait out people in crisis and use words instead of weapons. But this training isn't required in most states. Reveal teams up with APM Reports and finds that most cops spend a lot more time training to shoot their guns than learning how to avoid firing them.

African migrants fleeing persecution or seeking opportunity often end up in Libya, where they are tortured and trafficked. Many try to escape to Europe, only to be intercepted at sea and returned to Libya. On this episode of Reveal, we trace their journey and explore how Europe’s immigration policy is helping Libyan warlords and putting migrants at risk.

In 2014, WBEZ Chicago reporter Linda Lutton followed a class of fourth-graders at William Penn Elementary School on Chicago’s West Side. She wanted to explore a big idea that’s at the heart of the American dream: Can public schools be the great equalizer equalizer in society, giving everyone a chance to succeed, no matter where they come from or how much money their families have? Lutton told her story in a Peabody Award-nominated show, “The View From Room 205.” This week, Reveal presents a condensed version of that documentary.

Reveal digs deep – and gets results. This week’s episode shines a light on three recent investigations. By mining data from 31 million records, we discovered a pattern of routine mortgage loan denials to applicants of color in more than 60 U.S. metropolitan areas. Our story led to attorneys generals’ investigations and lawmakers’ demands for accountability at the federal, state and city levels. While many people of color have trouble getting mortgages, we investigate how one prominent American managed to own a high-end property for no money down.

Across the country, universities are being criticized over issues of money: from how they spend their endowments, to how they raise tuition, to how they award financial aid. Many students are feeling the pinch. They’re going into debt to pay for their education, or abandoning their dreams of a college degree altogether. This week on Reveal, we take a look at the bottom line for universities and students. This show contains an update to the original story about the University of Texas System. After it first aired on Dec.

Has President Donald Trump inspired the people committing hate crimes and other hate threats across the country? There’s been a lot of conversation about how Trump has inspired -- or at least capitalized on -- a new wave of hate in America. Little of that conversation has been based in provable facts. But Reveal’s Will Carless noticed a pattern while mining Documenting Hate, a collaboration led by ProPublica to collate hate incident data from across the country: People were using Trump’s name to taunt people of color, women, Muslims, immigrants and LGBT people.

Tech companies in Silicon Valley are under the microscope for not living up to their idealistic pledges to save the world. On this week’s episode of Reveal, we investigate companies on the cutting edge that are struggling to solve some old-fashioned problems: Worker safety at Tesla, and diversity at Google and beyond.

In 2016, the Justice Department alleged that Malaysian officials stole billions of dollars from their people and funneled some of it through the United States. Reveal teamed up with Washington D.C.’s public radio station, WAMU, to dig into one of the largest investigations ever by the Justice Department’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. It’s a tale that features cameos from Leonardo DiCaprio, Donald Trump, the world’s largest yacht, a Malaysian playboy known for his lavish spending in New York nightclubs, and – as you might imagine – lots of Champagne.

The toxic water of Flint, Michigan, reminded us that lead is a very persistent poison. This week, Reveal investigates the lurking threat of lead from the dust of urban demolitions to the wilds of Wyoming. Hear how contractors help one another cut corners on demolitions, putting kids at risk, while city officials study the problem. Meet a public health nurse who explains why she advises families to choose a homeless shelter over a lead-tainted apartment, and learn how childhood lead poisoning still affects one man decades later. Progress has been made cleaning up lead.

Across the country, criminals are arming themselves in unexpected ways. In Florida, they’re stealing guns from unlocked cars and gun stores. In other places, they’re getting them from the police themselves, as cash-strapped departments sell their used weapons to buy new ones. On this episode of Reveal, we learn where criminals get their guns and what cars can teach us about gun safety.