One of the best things about being on Reveal’s immigration team is the people. During the last few years, we’ve leaned on each other for support as we strive to cover this really competitive beat. It’s why you’ll often find at least two of our names at the top of our stories. Aura Bogado, Patrick Michels and I – along with our editor, Andy Donohue – each bring our own strengths to this team.

For Patrick, those talents include the ability to land vital public records through Freedom of Information Act requests, as well as his narrative writing. And beyond reporting and writing, Patrick also produced stories for our show and occasionally took photos for our projects. His breadth of knowledge in different kinds of storytelling allowed him to take on multiple roles for a single story. He’s also an incredible ally, someone who can offer advice on a complicated story at a moment’s notice and finds joy in the success of others.

He’s good at Pictionary, too. We play the game before our weekly team meetings as an icebreaker.

This is why saying goodbye to Patrick will be so hard for us. He’s moving on to another job (we’ll let him announce that later). During his last week at Reveal, I wanted to reflect on Patrick’s reporting over the last few years.   

Most recently, he jumped into covering the Trump administration’s failures in protecting immigrants from COVID-19. In March, as many corners of America grinded to a halt in response to the pandemic, the U.S. immigration system continued operating under business as usual, placing immigrants, attorneys and government employees at risk, our investigation found. And in September, Patrick and I brought you inside the COVID-19 testing disaster at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico. We obtained emails that showed New Mexico’s top health officials clearly were frustrated with the pandemic response from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its contractors, which continued transferring detainees despite warnings from New Mexico health staff that such movement could spread the virus. 

He won a prestigious award for his immigration reporting. Last year, Patrick won a national Edward R. Murrow Award, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, for his reporting on a Los Angeles immigration judge with a track record of denying asylum claims. Before she was a judge, Lorraine Muñoz advocated for farmworkers and refugees. Patrick learned that between 2013 and 2018, Muñoz denied 97% of asylum claims that came before her, 40% more than the national average. She sat down with Patrick for a recorded interview and acknowledged that she was a “demanding judge.”

Patrick also shined a light on the government’s care of migrant children. In the summer of 2019, Patrick and I partnered with WRAL News, the NBC affiliate in Raleigh, North Carolina, on an investigation into the government’s plan to send migrant children to shelter providers with little experience and documented pasts of abuse. Among those facilities was New Horizon Group Home, which was shut down in 2018 after inspectors found conditions that presented “an imminent danger” to children. After our story was published, state officials denied New Horizon’s application for a license to run the shelter. The federal government is also now instituting new provisions to flag problems like these, requiring that shelter providers disclose past violations in their grant applications.

A few months after our New Horizon reporting, Aura and Patrick broke the story about another child care provider, VisionQuest, and its proposal to open a shelter in Los Angeles. For decades, scandals plagued the company, which was repeatedly investigated for violent handling of children. After their reporting, Los Angeles became one of at least six cities or states that blocked VisionQuest’s efforts to open shelters.

The VisionQuest story is just one of many projects Aura and Patrick worked on together. Here’s what Aura had to say about him: “Patrick has a way of making space and bringing out the best in those around him. He's caring without being overbearing. His writing is impeccable. No one knows contracts the way Patrick knows contracts. And he has a really cool Pirates hat. 

“I've waited long past the deadline to finally write these words. Every single time I opened a page in my notebook to make a list of what I wanted to say, I turned the page. As if avoiding the written word would somehow give me more time with one of the best reporters and human beings I'll ever know. 

“There's so much more I could name, Patrick. But most of all, thank you for the way you've always made space for me. You exemplify what it means to be a true colleague. I'm so happy for your new opportunity! I can't wait for others to learn how talented and thoughtful you are. But damn. I'll really miss you.” 

And there are so many other stories, both in print and radio, that Patrick told during his roughly four years at Reveal. We’re going to miss you dearly, Patrick, and can’t wait to see what you’ll accomplish in your next endeavor.

Revisit Patrick’s work here. 

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.

DETAINEES SAY GUARDS THREATENED TO EXPOSE THEM TO COVID-19

Four detainees at two immigration detention facilities claim that guards threatened to house them in medical wards with COVID-19-positive detainees if they refused to sign documents to have them deported, The Intercept is reporting.

“They were forcing us out of the dorm, pushing and dragging us,” one of the detainees said. “They threatened to call the SWAT team. They said they were going to put all of us into Bravo-Alpha, which is for quarantine, where they keep everyone with coronavirus.” In a statement, ICE said it “has the utmost confidence in the professionalism of our workforce and their adherence to agency policy.”

The detainees who spoke out are being held at the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Louisiana and the Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama. Pine Prairie’s name might sound familiar. In April, we took you inside this facility, where asylum seekers said they felt helpless as they awaited the inevitable arrival of COVID-19 inside their dorms. 

THREE THINGS WE'RE READING 

1. Latino workers faced brutality and racial slurs during an immigration raid at a Tennessee meatpacking plant, court records reveal. (Knoxville News Sentinel)

In 2018, federal agents, along with Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers, stormed the Southeastern Provision meatpacking plant. They had secured a warrant to search the plant for documents maintained by the plant’s owner. But instead, the officials questioned several Latino workers about their immigration status, placed them in zip ties and insulted them with racial slurs, according to the court records. These details came to light in a class-action lawsuit filed by some of the workers.

The kicker: Their behavior – laid bare in court records – so shocked Chief U.S. District Judge Travis McDonough that he made a public appeal for the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the shield of immunity granted to federal law enforcement officers. The appeal is part of his latest ruling in a lawsuit about the raid. “The lesson here is that federal agents can avoid accountability for their violations of the Constitution by simply excluding state and local agencies from their next operation,” McDonough wrote in a Jan. 31 ruling. “Perhaps a higher court will recognize causes of action that more directly address agents’ searches and seizures based on skin color.”

2. To undo Trump’s anti-immigration legacy, the Biden administration will first have to uncover an intricate web of bureaucracy. (The New Yorker) 

From family separation at the border to a travel ban that blocked people from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S., dismantling immigration was a centerpiece of the Trump administration. But beyond the larger policy changes, the last presidency also quietly crafted a trail of bureaucratic measures that could impede President Joe Biden’s efforts to reverse former President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. 

The kicker: In the past four years, immigrants’-rights groups have improvised ways of keeping track. Kids in Need of Defense tallied changes that affected unaccompanied minors, and the Migration Policy Institute did the same for other vulnerable groups, including refugees who were stranded abroad. Immigrants have devised their own tools. In a detention facility in Florida, a group of African asylum seekers kept, on the walls of their cell, a list of the harshest immigration judges, developing a star system akin to Uber ratings. In Tijuana, asylum seekers kept a tattered notebook called La Lista, in which they tracked people waiting to present at a port of entry, given that Customs and Border Protection, through a policy called “metering,” was allowing only a small number to cross each day. “This has never been a political game for us,” Greisa Martinez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream, told me, of her own group’s efforts. “We had to follow how Trump used the full extent of his political office to bring detention and deportation and death to our communities.”

3. Colombia grants protection to more than 1.7 million Venezuelan migrants. (Miami Herald)

The country is granting temporary immigration status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing the economic and political crisis back home. “By taking this transcendental and historic step in Latin America, we hope that other countries follow our lead,” said President Iván Duque.

The kicker: Colombia has been praised for decisions allowing Venezuelan migrants to live, seek emergency medical care and go to school in the neighboring South American nation. While other nations initially accepted the new arrivals, several later moved to restrict entry. Prior to Monday’s announcement, Colombia had already granted legal status to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. The country also granted citizenship to thousands of Venezuelan children born in Colombia and at risk of statelessness.
 

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

– Laura C. Morel and Patrick Michels