When the pandemic began, it became clear early on that immigrants would likely be among the hardest hit by COVID-19.

Before I dive into all things immigration, I wanted to take a quick moment here to mention Reveal’s end-of-year fundraising campaign ([link removed]) . As a nonprofit, our organization isn’t beholden to any deep-pocketed owner or advertiser. We have the freedom to investigate important stories, like my colleague Aura Bogado’s “The Disappeared ([link removed]) ” series that exposed the government’s practice of detaining migrant children for years.

But our independence also means that our work relies on the generosity of our listeners, readers and funders. I hope you'll consider making a donation today. ([link removed]) From now until the end of the year, we're offering T-shirts with all new monthly donations of at least $11. Your donation ([link removed]) will immediately be doubled -- a board member of ours will match the gift.

We are grateful for your support and for sticking with us through this unprecedented year. Thank you!


** The stories that inspired us in 2020
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When the pandemic began, it became clear early on that immigrants would likely be among the hardest hit by COVID-19.

Thousands of detained immigrants became sick with the virus. The Trump administration shut down the border and turned away migrants seeking refuge here. It held migrant children in hotel rooms before rapidly deporting them to their home countries without the chance to have their asylum claims heard. The government also excluded undocumented immigrants from the stimulus package back in the spring.

While we tackled our own stories here at Reveal, our immigration team found inspiration every week in the work of other reporters across the country. In our last Kids of the Line newsletter of the year, I asked my team members to reflect on the reporting that stayed with them and inspired them this year.

As for me, I found inspiration in the work of local news reporters.

Miami Herald reporter Monique O. Madan’s relentless reporting helped shine a light on COVID-19 outbreaks at immigration detention facilities in South Florida. Her work cut through ICE’s secrecy week after week by exposing the agency’s failure to protect the people in its custody.

She broke the story ([link removed]) about how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials falsely claimed that no one in its custody in Florida had tested positive. She also reported on a COVID-19 outbreak ([link removed]) that erupted at one facility after ICE transferred dozens of detainees from a nearby detention center. As we reported ([link removed]) this year, detainee transfers contribute to the spread of the virus.

What’s even more impressive is that, as a local newspaper reporter, Monique usually only has one day to pull off a story. I know first-hand how hard the daily grind can be. It’s a hustle to call sources, get comments, write a story, and respond to edits all in a matter of hours. By the time your story publishes in tomorrow’s paper, you’re already chasing the next tip. In all, Monique has written more than four dozen stories ([link removed]) about immigrants in ICE detention during the pandemic.

I also recommend reading anything written by Los Angeles Times reporter Esmeralda Bermudez. Last December, she asked people on Twitter:

“What jobs did your parents work to get you where you are today?” She received a flood of responses, most of them stories of immigrant parents working in factories, in construction, as nannies, cleaning homes, so that their children could one day pursue their own dreams. Those responses led to this tribute for working-class parents ([link removed]) , filled with lyrical sentences like this one: “They flooded my feed, some with memories they likely hadn’t spoken of in years: the smell of engine oil in their father’s shirt, the cuts and bruises on their mother’s hands, the sound of the sewing machine rumbling through the house, day and night.”

Here’s what my colleagues had to say about their favorite stories of the year:

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Patrick Michels:
Two stories have stuck with me through 2020, one big and global, the other small and personal. To me, they both say a lot about how out-of-step this country’s border policies are with the world we found ourselves in this year, and the world we’ll be living in soon.

The first is Abrahm Lustgarten’s sprawling New York Times Magazine/ProPublica story ([link removed]) from July on global climate migration. The foundation of this piece is a model, commissioned by the Times and ProPublica, that projects not only where temperatures will make life unbearable in the coming decades, but also how people will escape – into cities in their home countries, and across distant international borders. The scale of the movement described here is sobering, and I’ve been trying to hold this perspective whenever I’m reading or reporting on immigration policy.

The second, from April, is Gardenia Mendoza’s story ([link removed]) in La Opinión, recounting Rubén Castro’s search for shelter after his deportation to Tijuana in the chaotic first weeks of the pandemic. Castro describes witnessing early signs of trouble at ICE’s Mesa Verde detention center (nearly half the detainees at Mesa Verde later tested positive ([link removed]) for COVID-19) before being deported to Tijuana at midnight. Shelters repeatedly turned the 33-year-old away, fearing that he’d bring the coronavirus with him; he tried hitchhiking but no one would stop; he hopped a train east to Puerto Peñasco but fell and hurt his neck. Eventually he was accepted at a Pueblo Sin Fronteras shelter in Sonoyta, nearly 300 miles from where he started. I still think back to Castro’s story when I
think about how powerful people have used the pandemic to push people out, and the extraordinary strength it takes to meet this challenge alone.

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Aura Bogado:

It’s difficult to pick just one story. So I’ll share three that have stuck with me.

The first is Melissa Sanchez’s investigation ([link removed]) for ProPublica into Central American migrant children who become child laborers, producing the cuts of choice meat you get from the butcher and the fancy croissants you enjoy with your morning coffee. By centering the children affected by cruel labor practices, Sanchez is able to untangle a circular web, exposing how children feel pressure to pay off migrant debt by performing labor that is explicitly prohibited by law. Yet violations are rarely investigated by authorities – when they are, individuals may be held accountable, but the larger framework that perpetuates child labor remains intact.

Tony Pham’s ascension to head of ICE this year was paraded as an example of the exceptional opportunities refugees can attain in the United States. But, as his cousin Philippa PB Hughes explains ([link removed]) in a Medium post, Pham’s own story about attaining a lawful pathway to citizenship is based on a lie. Pham announced he’s stepping down just a month after Hughes published her post.

Immigration, but make it fashion: Paula-Andrea runs a brand called Visa Issues, which Ruth Samuel writes about ([link removed]) in Glossy. While several brands have placed political messaging into their wares, it’s a lot more personal for Paula-Andrea. She’s a DACA recipient who “created her brand Visa Issues out of frustration with her status and the jarring language of immigration notices.” And she’s faced pushback for her fashion from Trump supporters as well as those who say her brand exploits a crisis. I keep returning to this article because it makes me think differently about immigration, commodification and the edges of trend.

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Andy Donohue:

As I drove south on Highway 101 near Salinas, California, in August, surrounded by the leafy greens of some of the most productive farm fields in the world, I saw the collision of so many of our time’s biggest challenges.

In the lettuce fields, farm workers labored through the pandemic to get healthy food into homes across the United States. Many of them had little choice. If they were undocumented, they wouldn’t qualify for the stimulus check and would face the decision of whether to take the risk and try to interact with the California state government to get an unemployment check.

Above them hovered a dusty, rusty layer of smoke, shooting out over the fields from one of the massive wildfires that raged across the west as summer drew to a close. It’s one of the images of this year that I will never forget.

And I knew the story of what was going on with those workers because of this Frontline documentary, COVID’s Hidden Toll ([link removed].) , by Daffodil Altan, Andrés Cediel and María José Calderón. Beautifully shot, the half-hour film tells the story of the immigrants and undocumented workers who are so essential to our food chain and economy.

One last plug, too: I’m inspired constantly by the steady stream of leaked documents and inside sources unearthed by BuzzFeed immigration reporter Hamed Aleaziz. He’s had so many great scoops this year that I have a hard time keeping them straight – so just follow him on Twitter ([link removed]) for the next one.
Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.
Yes, I want to help! ([link removed])
Your support helps give everyone access to credible, unbiased facts.
** 3 (OTHER) THINGS WE’RE READING
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1. Three years after the U.S. government began separating families at the border, the search for deported parents continues. (Arizona Republic ([link removed]) )

More than 300 parents separated from their children under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy have yet to be reunited with their children, and advocates on the ground in Central America are struggling to even locate them. They face a myriad of challenges, including outdated information provided by the U.S. government, parents hiding from local gangs, and parents who are suspicious of strangers knocking on their doors. Add the pandemic to the list and “the searches are hard, dangerous and time consuming.”

The kicker: Rebeca Sanchez Ralda, a Guatemalan lawyer and human rights defender, set out recently on a seemingly impossible task: Locating the missing father of a 4-year-old girl separated in 2017 at the Texas border under the Trump administration's notorious family separation policy. Sanchez Ralda was trying to locate the father, an impoverished farmworker, to determine if he was still in contact with his daughter, who had remained in the U.S. with sponsors after he had been deported to Guatemala. But Sanchez Ralda had very little information to go by. No address. No phone number. Just the father's name and the name of the municipality where he was from. The municipality, however, was made up of dozens of small towns and villages. Sanchez Ralda had no idea in which town the father lived or even if he still lived there.

2. The Trump administration says the U.S. cannot accommodate migrant children. Shelters operators disagree. (CBS News ([link removed]) )

Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop rapidly deporting unaccompanied migrant children at the border during the pandemic. Trump officials are now arguing in court that without resuming the expulsions, the government risks reaching maximum capacity within its shelter network by early 2021. But several shelter operators who spoke on the condition of anonymity disagreed with the government. They say the shelters can accommodate the children in a safe way by expediting the release of children to family members or suitable sponsors and asking contractors to increase bed capacity.

The kicker: "(The Office of Refugee Resettlement) should right now be working to accommodate children's rights and safety, looking at how they can reconfigure and utilize their existing shelter system and doing what they can now to improve the efficiency of releasing kids to families and sponsors, safely," a second shelter operator said. The shelter officials acknowledged the logistical challenges, but said that the refugee office could act more quickly in some cases and expedite the release of children who have U.S. sponsors willing to care for them, move others to housing further inland to make space for new arrivals and ask contractors to increase bed capacity. As a last resort, the agency could also reopen two emergency "influx" facilities in Texas and Florida, the people said. "Every year there has been a large number of kids crossing the border at a point in time, and ORR has adjusted their practices to allow for the appropriate and the efficient movement of these kids," the third
contractor said.

3. Millions of Americans living with undocumented family members aren’t eligible for stimulus help. (The Marshall Project ([link removed]) )

According to new estimates by the research organization Migration Policy Institute, 5.1 million Americans and legal permanent residents were not eligible for stimulus payments early on in the pandemic if they lived in a mixed status family where someone in their household is undocumented. That exclusion was eliminated in recent drafts of a new stimulus package currently being negotiated in Congress.

The kicker: At first it seemed like an infuriating bureaucratic error, the message that kept repeating when Roy Wright called a hotline to find out when he would receive his coronavirus stimulus funds. “Not available,” it said. Wright said he had paid all his taxes. He manages a car wash in Baltimore, working steadily for the same company for the past 25 years. By April, as the pandemic gutted the city’s economy, the lines of cars were gone. His hours were cut and his income plunged. All around him people were receiving federal payments. Wright soon learned there was no mistake. He would not get the aid because of an exclusion deep in the $2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that Congress passed in March. If any family member filed a return using a taxpayer identification number, a legally valid alternative for people who do not have a Social Security number, the whole family was disqualified from payments. Wright, an American citizen, had filed jointly with his wife, an immigrant from Honduras
who is undocumented. Because she was listed with her taxpayer number, he lost out on payments for himself and six children—a total of at least $4,900. “Man, I could really use that money,” he said recently. “I’m riding around to every church I can to get food. I’m doing what I got to do to survive.”

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** NEWS BREAK: A HAPPY ENDING FOR LUCY
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For months, Lucy the dog was skittish of anyone who came near her at a street corner across from a mall. Not even animal control officials could catch her. But with a little patience and determination, Regina Quinn and her dog, Brody, gained Lucy’s trust.

From The Virginian-Pilot story ([link removed]) :

Lucy ran away from her adopted owners in December of 2018. She would sit near a traffic light across from Lynnhaven Mall, where people would feed her, and retreat into the woods when anyone approached her.

Animal Control and dog rescue groups tried unsuccessfully to trap Lucy.

Regina Quinn, with help from her dog, Brody, spent several months gaining Lucy’s trust. On Sunday, she was able to leash Lucy, and the dog is now at Virginia Beach Animal Control and Care Center. Quinn plans to visit her this week.

Lucy has been eating well. Animal Control officers posted on Facebook that she’s overweight but in good health.
Quinn saw Lucy on the side of the road in June and was shocked that she hadn’t been trapped yet.

“It was like a divine calling,” she said. “A lot of times animals just choose you.”

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Your tips have been vital to our immigration coverage. Keep them coming: [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) .

See you in 2021!

– Laura C. Morel

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