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Series: St. Jude’s Unspent Billions - Behind the Hospital’s Claims to Donors

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

A series of sharp knocks on his driver’s side window startled Jason Burt awake.

It was the middle of the night on a Saturday in 2016. Burt was sleeping in his pickup truck in the parking lot of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in downtown Memphis, Tennessee, where his 5-year-old daughter was being treated for brain cancer. He’d driven more than 500 miles from his home in Central Texas to visit her.

A St. Jude security guard peered into the truck and asked Burt what he was doing. Burt explained that his daughter and her mother, his ex-girlfriend, were staying in the hospital’s free patient housing. But St. Jude provides housing for only one parent. Burt, a school bus driver making $20,000 a year, told the guard he couldn’t afford a hotel. The guard let the exhausted father go back to sleep.

St. Jude would do no more to find him a place to stay.

“They were aware of the situation,” Burt said. “I didn’t push anything. I was just grateful she was getting treated and I was doing what I needed to do.”

St. Jude is the largest and most highly regarded health care charity in the country. Each year, the Memphis hospital’s fundraisers send out hundreds of millions of letters, many with heart-wrenching photographs of children left bald from battling cancer. Celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Sofia Vergara sing the hospital’s praises in televised advertisements. This year, St. Jude’s fundraising reached outer space. The SpaceX Inspiration4 mission in September included a former St. Jude patient as a crew member.

Several members of Arizona’s congressional delegation may have big decisions to make before next year’s election based on the proposed boundaries of the state’s new political map. 

The draft congressional map approved last month by the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission puts several incumbents into unfavorable districts. Some of those district boundaries will change by the time the commission approves its final maps, likely sometime in late December, and those revisions could be to some incumbents’ benefit. Exactly how different the final districts will look is impossible to predict.

Members of Congress don’t have to live in the districts where they run, only in the states they represent. That leaves several Arizona representatives with options if the AIRC doesn’t change the map to their liking.  

U.S. Rep. Debbie Lesko, a Peoria Republican, currently represents a heavily GOP district that includes her hometown, along with Surprise, Sun City and surrounding areas. When the AIRC approved its draft map, however, the area she represents was largely split between two districts — and she doesn’t live in either of them. 

By just four houses, Lesko now lives in the proposed predominantly Latino, overwhelmingly Democratic 3rd District. Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego lives in the district, which is similar to the district he’s represented since he was first elected in 2014.

If Lesko is still in the 3rd District when the commission approves its final map, she’s certain to run elsewhere. Most of Peoria is in the 8th District, a Republican-leaning but competitive district that extends into Glendale and north Phoenix. Large chunks of her current district are also in the 9th District, an overwhelmingly Republican district that takes in must of the West Valley — from Sun City West and Surprise in the north to Goodyear and Litchfield Park to the south — and extends to the state’s western border, taking in La Paz and Mohave counties and part of Yuma County.

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Kino Border Initiative

An asylum-seeking woman from Mexico leads a protest in Nogales, Sonora in February 2021 demanding President Joe Biden restore the processing of asylum cases. On Nov. 8, 2021, migrants in Nogales continue to demand the Biden administration discontinue its expulsion policy under Title 42 that prevents adults and children from seeking asylum protections in the U.S.

As entry restrictions lifted on Monday in a welcomed reopening of the land U.S. border crossings to some tourists from Mexico, the Biden administration is continuing to deny entry to asylum-seekers from Mexico and Central America under a Trump-era emergency public health rule.

Lisandro, a migrant from southern Mexico using a pseudonym to protect his identity, tried to request entry to the country with his wife and two kids Monday morning under U.S. asylum law at a Nogales border crossing. He presented his COVID-19 vaccination card, but a border agent turned the family away. 

“He said that, for the time being, there is no asylum. The border is only open to tourists with a passport and a visa,” Lisandro said at a press conference Monday. “I have the vaccine. It’s my right to ask for asylum and I am fleeing from a very dangerous place. How is it possible that they do this to us?”

The press conference was held by the Kino Border Initiative, a faith-based organization that provides shelter, food and other humanitarian services to migrants waiting in Nogales, Sonora, for a chance to get protections from prosecution and violence as outlined by U.S. and international law. The organization is among the various Arizona and national groups that have denounced the invocation of public health powers, known as Title 42, which effectively closed U.S. borders and allows border agents to immediately “expel” anyone they encounter at and between official ports of entry — even if they are seeking asylum under U.S. law.    

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Jeremy Duda, Arizona Mirror

Katie Hobbs avoided a mistake that contributed to her party’s upset loss in Virginia last week, saying that Arizona parents should have a great deal of input into what their children learn in school.

Asked about parental control and the effect the issue had on the Virginia governor’s race, Hobbs, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in next year’s gubernatorial race, told reporters during a press conference Tuesday that curriculum is a local issue — and one that school districts and school boards should work with parents to determine.

“We absolutely need parents as partners in our education system. We need to do everything we can to make sure that every student in Arizona, no matter where they live, has access to high-quality public education, and that starts with bringing our teachers and our parents together to work together to make that happen,” Hobbs told reporters.

Parental control over curriculum has been a hot-button issue throughout the year, as parents and conservative activists have swarmed school board meetings across the country, including in Arizona, to denounce “critical race theory.” The term, which refers to a field of academic study about the ways in which race and racism are intertwined with American society, has become a broad, catchall term used by Republicans to describe teaching about certain racially sensitive topics.

The issue came to the forefront in the recently concluded Virginia governor’s race. Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe said during a Sept. 29 debate that, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” which many observers believe contributed to his loss to Republican Glenn Youngkin on Tuesday.