The stories that inspired us in 2020
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 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 that erupted at one facility after ICE transferred dozens of detainees from a nearby detention center. As we reported 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 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, 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:
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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, 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 for the next one.
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