Lomi Kriel is a reporter with the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative. Previously she was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle covering immigration, often focused on the Texas border. Six months before the Trump administration announced its family separation policy, Kriel uncovered how the government was secretly using the prosecution of illegal entry to detain parents until deportation and send children to federal shelters. Her stories resulted in the release of one mother and helped spur a pivotal American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit largely ending the practice. She received the 2019 George Polk Award for national reporting, in part for her continued work on family separations.
Kriel, who was born and raised in South Africa, immigrated to the United States in 1998. She has also worked as a Central American correspondent for Thomson Reuters and a criminal justice reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University and speaks Afrikaans and Spanish.
The new material largely affirms prior reporting by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE detailing law enforcement’s failures to engage the teen shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers in 2022.
The decision to buck federal government guidelines was one of many that led to serious repercussions for Texas residents who rely on Medicaid. Among them were children forced to forgo or postpone lifesaving operations, doctors say.
After an officer noticed that part of his bodycam footage was absent from a recently released trove of records, an audit found “several additional videos” that were not included. It’s unclear if prosecutors previously had access to this video.
The release is the first major disclosure of documents by a government agency involved in the flawed response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, and it comes after a yearslong legal battle involving nearly two dozen news outlets.
Attorneys for the families have also filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Public Safety, the principal of Robb Elementary School and the district’s former police chief. More suits could be coming by a Friday deadline.
As a grand jury considers whether any law enforcement officers are criminally charged for their inaction during the Robb Elementary shooting, some families say they feel they've been let down and betrayed by elected officials.
No states mandate annual active shooter training for police officers, according to an analysis by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE. In comparison, at least 37 states require such training in schools, typically on a yearly basis.
In a long-awaited report, the Justice Department found widespread failures in the official response to the 2022 shooting. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that had officers followed accepted practices, “lives would have been saved.”
Even if an after-action investigation is released, a lack of national standards leads to wide variability in the detail of information in reports, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE found.
Across the country, states require more training to prepare students and teachers for mass shootings than for those expected to protect them. The differences were clear in Uvalde, where children and officers waited on opposite sides of the door.
The proposed legislation comes after an investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Washington Post revealed that communication lapses among medical crews further delayed treatment for victims at Robb Elementary.
Previously unreleased video, audio and interviews show for the first time how the medical response faltered after police finally confronted the Robb Elementary shooter.
Audio and police camera footage obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune show the depths of confusion in the law enforcement response to the Uvalde school shooting.
State troopers outnumbered local law enforcement 2-to-1 outside Robb Elementary, but the Department of Public Safety has blocked the release of records and carefully shaped the narrative to cast local authorities as incompetent.
Gov. Greg Abbott claimed Texas provides expectant mothers “necessary resources so that they can choose life for their child,” but it is now one of a dwindling number of states not to offer Medicaid coverage for a full year after residents give birth.
As they investigated Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s border initiative, reporters repeatedly found situations where Abbott and DPS officials cited accomplishments that lacked crucial context or did not match reality. Here are a few examples.
Since 2005, Texas Govs. Rick Perry and Greg Abbott have launched a multitude of widely publicized and costly border initiatives, which usually kicked off during their reelection campaigns or while they were considering bids for higher office.
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