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InvestigateWest

Nonprofit investigative newsroom keeping an eye on decision-makers in the Pacific Northwest.

Our mission is to engage Pacific Northwest residents in social issues by providing compelling, change making investigative and explanatory journalism.

05/20/2026

Washington was the first to enact “Don’t Pass the Trash” legislation two decades ago, but gaps remain. Experts say these reforms could help hold more teachers accountable for sexual abuse.

05/14/2026

After two-month-old Opal Oaks died in February 2023, Oregon prosecutors suspected the father of abuse - and the mom of protecting him, instead of their child.

The mother, Deborah Albin, has said she took Opal to regular checkups and the doctor never flagged the baby's broken ribs. Albin also says that she, too was abused by the dad. The state has tried to limit how much evidence of domestic violence she can discuss at trial.

The case echoes patterns in similar "failure to protect" cases brought across the country, which critics say rely on unrealistic stereotypes about mothers facing domestic violence and can unfairly punish victims for their partner's actions.

05/13/2026

When a 7-year-old girl, caught in the middle of a custody battle, said that her uncle r***d her and that her dad didn’t protect her, Angela Rinaldo wasn’t convinced.

Rinaldo, a guardian ad litem appointed to represent the child’s best interests, believed that the girl had been coached to make the allegations. She maintained that belief as prosecutors charged the uncle for child r**e and as a jury later convicted him.

A judge later called out Rinaldo for failing to do her job. But by then, the girl's mom said the damage had already been done.

05/07/2026

Idaho’s rapid rise in incarceration rates has left the state with more prisoners than space to house them -- and those already incarcerated say they’re unfairly being punished for it. Five women told us they were sent to segregated housing units - small cells usually reserved for punishment - where they were confined for 23 hours a day.

05/02/2026

Mill Creek Police launched an investigation into Everett Public Schools teacher Kevin Kukla in April 2024 after a custodian found Kukla receiving a back massage from a student in his locked classroom. Although the teacher and student, then 18, denied they were romantically involved, years of text messages between the two reference kissing, loving and missing each other, and being afraid someone saw them lying in the back of the teacher’s car.

The police investigation ended after a detective found there wasn’t enough evidence to prove a physical relationship between the two. Kukla resigned from his position in June 2024 amid the school district’s third-party investigation, which he refused to participate in.

Later that year, Kukla found another job as an adjunct instructor at Shoreline Community College, just north of Seattle.

04/30/2026

The sheriff's office in Owyhee County, Idaho has received at least $116,000 from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of its agreement for local deputies to assist in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, one of hundreds of departments across the country collecting payments.

InvestigateWest obtained records of the payments, which offer some insight into how the federal dollars are being used by the sheriff’s office to boost its resources.

04/21/2026

A new Idaho law expands the definition of illegal sexual contact between prison staff and inmates, after InvestigateWest's reporting exposed how a previous state law made it difficult to prosecute prison guards for abuse.

04/17/2026

In Washington, courts have appointed guardians ad litem to over 7,000 family law cases since 2020 to investigate how issues like domestic violence, abuse and other factors impact kids' safety. But despite courts' frequent reliance on these professionals, there’s little independent oversight of the role, leaving many parents without a meaningful way to hold them accountable for inaccurate, biased or shoddy investigations.

04/16/2026

As the Trump administration has escalated immigration arrests, immigrant Portlanders are increasingly worried about how license plate readers and other surveillance technologies are helping federal immigration agents track their movements — in many cases, leading to their arrests without a warrant or reasonable suspicion.

At the Voz Worker Center in Southeast Portland, one worker, Nemorio, recalls all the license plate readers he's seen in parking lots across Portland - at Lowe's, grocery stores like WinCo and Fred Meyer, and even a Latino grocery store in Gresham. Any one of those cameras could have led to an encounter last October when an ICE vehicle followed his truck after he left a work site. Nemorio says he was lucky, because the agents eventually split off to follow a different car instead.

This happened to him despite living in a sanctuary city, within a sanctuary county and state. As Feet in 2 Worlds reporter Narimes Parakul found, the federal government has been able to buy access to private databases and leverage other public data to track immigrants and ultimately circumvent sanctuary laws.

Illustration by Dabin Han.

04/15/2026

Immigration attorneys, like Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel of the National Immigration Law Center, say they've seen detention derail what would otherwise be straightforward asylum cases — and even push people to give up their cases to avoid lengthy stays in detention centers.

04/12/2026

The reforms come roughly 2 ½ years after InvestigateWest’s “Cruelest Lie” series exposed child abuse and neglect at youth residential facilities

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