THE WEEKLY REVEAL

Hello! In this issue:

• Tracing the impact of our award-winning series American Rehab

• How religious leaders are advocating for abortion access 

• The inequality between treatment of refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST

American Rehab: A Desperate Call

Our award-winning series American Rehab investigates how treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce.  

The investigative podcast built on years of Reveal reporting that uncovered, for the first time, the shocking and legally questionable practices employed by rehab work camps across the country – practices that participants and experts alike compared to indentured servitude and even slavery.

The project has created enormous impact since the first story published in October 2017:

• Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin said the rehab work camp model violates federal law and called for a congressional investigation into rehabs that receive federal funding. The investigation began in May 2022.

• Former clients filed six lawsuits against the drug rehab Cenikor, alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. They were all consolidated and in April 2022, a federal judge certified it as a class action, applying to more than 2,700 people who worked for Cenikor since May 2016. 

• More than a dozen lawsuits have been filed against work-based programs since our reporting began. The Salvation Army is facing lawsuits in multiple states from former rehab clients who worked for as little as $1 a week. In North Carolina, for example, former clients sued the director of Recovery Connections Community, which shut down after Reveal’s investigation, for exploiting their unpaid labor.  

• In 2021, Cenikor CEO Bill Bailey announced the company was effectively shutting down its residential treatment programs. Cenikor said it was"transitioning" them into sober living environments, which are unregulated in Texas (and many other states).

But despite its problems, Cenikor has received millions of dollars in public money. In April 2020, Cenikor received a Paycheck Protection Program loan of $3.9 million. In June 2021, the PPP loan and the related interest was forgiven in full. In 2021, Cenikor received more than $10 million in state and federal funds to provide treatment services. The company has been expanding, with recent acquisitions in Texas and New Mexico. 

Over the next three weeks, we’re re-airing the first three episodes of the eight-part series. In the first episode, Reveal reporter Shoshana Walter gets a disturbing phone call from a stranger: Penny Rawlings has just read one of Walter’s stories about Cenikor. Rawlings is desperate to learn more because her brother is a participant there. Rawlings helped send him to Cenikor – but didn’t realize getting him out of treatment was going to be the bigger problem. You can listen to the full series on our Reveal Presents podcast feed, which highlights our investigative series.

FEATURED STORIES

The US Has Approved Only 123 Afghan Humanitarian Parole Applications in the Last Year

Our episode last week highlighted the treatment of refugees fleeing Afghanistan in the year since Kabul fell to the Taliban. Reveal got copies of government records showing that more than a year since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, the U.S. government has approved less than 2% of Afghan applications it processed for its humanitarian parole program. Since July 2021, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has collected nearly $20 million from 66,000 applications filed through something called a Form I-131 and approved just 123 of the less than 8,000 applications processed. Read the full story.

The Religious Right Mobilized to End Roe – Now What?

In the News

🔹 A bill aiming to aid Black farmers was rewritten to remove race. A $4 billion federal program was meant to help about 15,000 Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian American, Pacific Islander and Latino farmers who had faced racial discrimination. But a group of White farmers filed suit, saying the program would discriminate against them. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, congressional Democrats rewrote the policy to remove race from the eligibility requirements. Instead, $2.2 billion is set aside to aid farmers and ranchers who faced discrimination of any kind. Reveal’s episode Losing Ground reported on the barriers Black farmers face: Black families went from owning nearly a million farms in 1920 to now fewer than 36,000.

🔹 A group that profits off spreading voter fraud myths is teaming up with right-wing sheriffs. Texas-based group True the Vote raised millions of dollars in donations claiming that it has evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election. But the group has never released any evidence of voter fraud and instead, a Reveal investigation found, gave more than $1 million in questionable payments to its founder, a board member and its lawyer. Now, True the Vote is seeking powerful new allies: local sheriffs. True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht has joined forces with Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County in Arizona, leader of the conservative sheriffs group Protect America Now, to create a new website ProtectAmerica.Vote, which promotes a larger role for sheriffs in monitoring elections. “I think it’s a significant overreach of authority by sheriffs across the country …  to on their own declare they have the authority to investigate voting fraud,” David Mahoney, a former president of the country’s largest sheriffs organization, told The Guardian. 

🔹 The Oregon governor’s race could hinge on one big issue: homelessness. OPB reports that the three women running for Oregon governor have all made homelessness a key issue. In June, Reveal reporter Melissa Lewis documented tensions about how to respond to homelessness in West Coast cities, as the combination of a mental health crisis and a decade-long real estate boom has created a new, especially vulnerable, especially visible generation of the unhoused. And as the unsheltered increasingly live on streets in residential neighborhoods, their new neighbors have turned to one place for help in particular: the police. Read the full story.

A Number to Remember

That's how many Ukrainians have been approved for humanitarian parole, which gives them temporary entry into the United States. In contrast, government records reveal that only 123 Afghan humanitarian parole applicants have been approved – despite more than 66,000 Afghans applying over the past year.