Everyone's Beat is Immigration

I have been trying to write this post about immigration and newsrooms since before the inauguration. It’s changed and morphed several times as you might imagine. Actually I would love for you to imagine that I took more than a month poring over these words but in fact I mostly mostly had writers block and also I was really busy.

Re: Your Tweet

My parents are from Egypt and I was born here in the states. My dad told me I’m not allowed to write about his business on the internet so that’s really all the information I can provide so he doesn’t get mad at me when he finally decides to read this five years from now. Anyways, this is to say that while I am not an immigrant myself, I have some clumsy understanding of the immigrant experience, as well as a stubborn pride that my parents really did that. Of course, I also have all of the attendant identity issues of a second generation American Middle Eastern person who came of age post-9/11 but that’s a whole other writing project that I’ll probably be working on for the rest of my life.

Anywaaaays. As children of immigrants were want to do after the 2016 election, I had tweeted something mentioning that I was a child of immigrants. I deleted my Twitter a while ago, so I can’t tell you exactly what it was anymore - I think was responding to some early Trump administration outrage over immigration by trying to provide some kind of context, and prefacing it with AHEM ahem “as a child of immigrants…” 

What I can tell you was that at the time I was an education reporter for KUNC in northern Colorado, and thus I had pored over every word to make sure this tweet wouldn’t “get me in trouble,” the way every woman pores over every email to gauge the correct number of exclamation points to include so as not to seem like a huge bitch. Nonetheless, the general manager of my whole station Slack messaged me moments later asking me to come down to his office. Once I arrived, I was ordered to promptly delete the tweet. Little explanation was given. 

Honestly, this is kind of a trivial incident, except some version of it felt like it would keep happening over the next few years.

A couple of years later, at my next job at Colorado Public Radio, controversy struck! I think this episode more neatly exemplifies what I’m trying to get at than my own foggy memories of 2016 do. In 2019, Aída Chávez, who was at the time a journalist for The Intercept, recollected a similar experience on twitter: while in her third year at Arizona State University, Chávez was working at the Cronkite News Washington Bureau. In response to some of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric during the 2016 election, she tweeted: "Fact: I wouldn't be here if my father didn't cross the border. He's an engineer. I'm trying to get two degrees and graduate early.”

Her boss emailed her later that evening calling the tweet “inappropriate,” telling her that “…a news reporter in Washington working for an organization that is trying to fairly cover a variety of issues cannot post a pro-immigration tweet during an immigration speech by a presidential candidate.” (You better believe that emphasis is mine.)

It just so happens that her boss at the time of this tweet was my boss at the time that she was recollecting this experience in 2019: Kevin Dale. Her account went viral in 2019 and a lot of people (rightfully) dragged Dale on twitter over it. He convened a meeting about the whole episode, during which he continued to dig in his heels. I’m not kidding, we had an actual staff meeting about how people were being mean to him on twitter.

These incidents had always stuck with me because they gave me this icky feeling that to have pride in my family and where they come from was somehow at odds with my credibility as a journalist. Or to put it less generously: my experience being the progeny of foreign-born immigrants was somehow in and of itself a conflict of interest, and any “objective,” news organization would be right to try to paper that over.

In 2020, newsrooms would go on to engage in similar punitive action against Black reporters discussing racial injustice. For example Alexis Johnson, a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was banned from covering racial justice protests after her OBVIOUSLY JOKING TWEET: “Horrifying scenes and aftermath from selfish LOOTERS who don’t care about this city!!!!! .... oh wait sorry. No, these are pictures from a Kenny Chesney concert tailgate. Whoops.” She would go on to sue the paper, but the case was later dropped on a technicality.

All of this tweet policing is obviously in service to the sacred holy order of journalistic objectivity, but these examples lay bare how “objectivity” tends to be wielded against anyone who isn’t a white guy. If a colleague, for example, tweeted about how their family lineage can be traced back to the Mayflower, this would not be seen by newsroom leaders as an inherent conflict of interest, would it? Would such a post call into question whether or not that reporter could fairly cover other white people? No. It would pass without notice.

I think about this a lot in regards to immigration because of the incredible weight local newsrooms now bear in covering what is happening – in short, everyone’s beat is immigration now. But I worry that newsrooms are weakened in a number of ways, and their squeamishness is only one of them.

The Average Person

Knows fuck all about immigration. It’s true. Even immigrants themselves or children of immigrants have some silly ideas about how the process works. Most people would be surprised if you told them basic facts about the immigration process.

The shortest, dirtiest explanation I can proffer here for the incredible amount of undocumented people who reside in America is this: it’s very hard to immigrate legally, and those obstacles don’t stop people from coming anyways. That simple fact is something policymakers up and down the chain have been aware of for quite some time, no matter what party they belong to. But in recent decades, making it easier to legally emigrate to the United States has basically become a politically radioactive idea.

The last meaningful reform adopted at the federal level is DACA, Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which happened a whopping 13 years ago. Since then, Biden has also issued Temporary Protected Status to arrivals from certain countries who meet certain criteria. Both of these actions – DACA and TPS – are more or less at the sole pleasure of the president, and must be renewed after certain periods of time. The immigration system itself, the bedrock underneath of this, remains unchanged, regardless of how many bandaids presidents slap on it from time to time.

Most Americans have no conception of the cruel joke of America’s immigration system: 

• The immense cost and the incredible number of years it takes to obtain a green card. 

• How different visas even work, and how they dictate where you can work and whether or not you can quit. 

• The innumerable hoops to jump through, and the countless ways you can be disqualified. 

• The restrictions non-citizens face when it comes to their ability to speak and express themselves freely. (Shout out to the Knight First Amendment Institute - I recently worked on their podcast Views on First, and the latest season is entirely focused on this intersection. I’ve learned a lot from this team, to my horror.) 

Most Americans approach the so-called “immigration debate” without any of this context. They know what they know from politicians. And politicians in both parties have long embraced an enforcement-centric approach, one that almost entirely obscures the root causes of our current immigration pickle. So that’s the information environment most Americans are operating in.

On the national level, many newsrooms are simply not equipped to really inform people of the stakes. With Trump’s return to office, that much is incredibly clear (see The New York Times’ exclusive photo op at Guantanamo Bay’s new tent city! Entirely devoid of any context for what these camps portend). That means it’s truly up to local newsrooms to inform people of the context and the consequences of this administration’s policies. 

Local news rules. Here’s an example of some of the incredible reporting happening in my city around immigrations raids. And yet, I am worried about local newsrooms having to bear the weight of this immense story all on their own. Especially when I look outside of Denver, where we are spoiled with newsrooms, and see how many communities only have one – or none at all. In these places, people are much more likely to be getting their news from national outlets or social media.

Here’s what they don’t get: stories like this that are not just about immigrants and immigration – they’re about mothers, children, neighbors and communities. It is the truth, or at least a sliver of it, that people desperately need to see and hear.

An important component of our politics these days is theater. One party in particular goes to great lengths to contort and manipulate public opinion. It’s harder to combat this when newsrooms are run by people who don’t take this into account. Instead, they cow to imagined conservative critics, making people like me delete tweets instead of drawing upon us as valuable resources with lived experience that could inform reporting. 

There has been a lot of talk of "complying in advance” lately under this new presidency. I would argue this has been happening in newsrooms for quite some time, thanks to leaders who take the bait instead of being able to see bad faith theater for what it is. 

Let me give you an example.

Places, Everyone

In 2022, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, launched this program called Operation Lone Star. Migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border would be loaded up onto busses and shipped to so-called “sanctuary cities,” as a political stunt. Early efforts – like the airlift that dropped migrant families in Martha’s Vineyard – gained some national attention and outrage, but national media quickly moved on while the busses kept coming.

I live in Denver, which received about 40,000 new arrivals in little more than a year through Operation Lone Star. Many people who arrived on these were in the process of applying for asylum. Some busloads of people were dropped off in below-freezing temperatures right in front of the Colorado state capitol. Children, families, treated like props in a grotesque political theater.

In more ways than one, Denverites rose to the occasion to help their new neighbors find food, shelter and legal work. But the story doesn’t end there. Many of our new neighbors come from Venezuela, fleeing economic collapse. But after arriving here and finally getting settled, many found themselves on shaky ground once again. As social media latched onto Trump’s phony narrative that Venezuelan gangs had taken over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado, residents desperately tried to correct the record, even holding their own press conferences to get their message out.

But the call literally came from inside the house: the property management originated the lie that gangs had taken over their buildings. That lie was meant to cover for their slumlord behavior that exposed residents to unsafe conditions, infestations, and yes, crime. 

If you only read national news, you’d miss this subtext. In fact, you’d miss most of the subtext up until the whole part about the gangs, and chances are you’d miss the detail about the slumlord. You mostly certainly wouldn’t know that Republicans had acted in concert to use asylum seekers as props, arranging them in the right place at the right time in order to tell the right lies.

Many recent arrivals from Venezuela over the last few years have obtained Temporary Protected Status and legal authorization to work in the U.S. The Trump administration now wishes to strip that away, and once again use these people as props in their propaganda effort. This week, ICE agents conducted a raid at these same apartment buildings, which are now largely vacant, and lo and behold: they had cameras in tow. 

A pattern is emerging. A recent appalling raid in Phoenix targeting an older gentleman employed an armored car, flash grenades and a battering ram – and notably, without a warrant. Through it all, agents had a photographer at their backs. After officers were finished playing with all their paramilitary toys, Marco Garcia watched ICE forcibly remove his 61-year-old father and noticed the photographer in the flack jacket, filming the whole thing “like it was propaganda, like a commercial.” 

Real people have been hurt. Real people are getting hurt. But this is also all for show. It’s theater. As journalists, we will have to work a lot harder to expose it for what it is.

So what does this have to do with a tweet? 

Don’t repeat the mistakes of the first Trump presidency by alienating people in your own newsroom. In fact, anyone in your newsroom who has so much as brushed the immigration system now has a unique expertise that your white boy managers likely lack. Making good use of that is not only good journalism, it is of the utmost importance to communities at this very moment. It is service.

The flip side of this is that the immigrants in your newsroom are probably freaked the fuck out right now. The people in your newsroom who are married to immigrants, or whose parents and grandparents are immigrants – they are likely working through the same fear and uncertainty as the subjects of your stories. All while trying to do their jobs.

And here’s a dirty little secret – many of them were probably feeling some of that same fear and uncertainty under the last Trump presidency. I know from my own experience that to admit to those feelings in a newsroom feels practically verboten. I know back then no one was talking about how to support immigrants, or coming up with a plan for what to do if one of your reporters should cross immigration enforcement. But I’ve been out of a newsroom for a while, so maybe things have changed? My gut tells me otherwise.

In this moment, newsroom leaders need to set aside their squeamishness. You need to keep your eye on the ball. Your problem, my dudes, is not the renegade tweets of your brown and Black reporters. You have far bigger fish to fry. Your newsrooms are counting on you.