Two brothers who spent 14 years apart sit at a kitchen table in a mobile home outside of Minneapolis. The elder one, David, looks around at the freshly painted blue walls with pride. He’s adding new window frames, flooring and appliances bit by bit to make a home for his family. David left El Salvador […]
Can’t say it enough: Crossing the border to seek asylum is not illegal
After Vice President Mike Pence made remarks in meeting with leaders of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, I tried to clarify something on Twitter about what he said. It seems to have struck a chord — or a nerve — with many people. Can’t say it enough, even for those who discourage dangerous migrations: It’s […]
Covering immigration: What reporters get wrong and how to get it right
I’ve spent the last three years, in my position as a senior editor for Global Nation, PRI’s The World’s immigration desk, developing training material for our contributors (and amazing group of dedicated reporters — check out their work) and for reporters around the country to be able to better cover the United States’ large and […]
Lives on the Line: Caring for Displaced People
I was honored to help craft and lead this conversations with health care providers and a journalist about what matters most to people fleeing conflicts. I learned from the panelists, and hope you can too. The event was hosted by Doctors Without Borders at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and was streamed online to […]
In Texas, the conflicts between immigration enforcement and public safety concerns is on display
What’s happening in Texas is part of a larger national debate about how local and state law enforcement policies can affect public safety. SB4 is the first state law seeking to penalize sanctuary cities, but many other similar pieces of legislation are moving through states around the country. On the other hand, the governor of Illinois signed […]
“I wish my body could tell the difference…”
I worked with reporter Tiziana Rinaldi on a story that took great courage on the part of the people who spoke with us. Laura López, a 29-year-old DACA recipient in Provo, Utah, told me about what it’s like to panic. The physicality of it is striking. “I wish my body could tell the difference between […]
An immigration data workshop at Investigative Reporters and Editors
There are some 320 million people in the US. 43 million of them were born abroad. About 11 million people are undocumented and over 5.1 million children have one or more undocumented parent. 860,000 people have applied for temporary legal status because they were brought to the US without proper documentation as children. Over 500,000 […]
April 6 in Chicago: People-Centered Immigration Storytelling
I led a workshop at the Journalism and Women Symposium in Virginia in October that I think was supposed to be about technology. But the only tools anyone really needed was some scratch paper and a pen. What I’ve found in developing a social strategy for Public Radio International and for our immigration coverage, Global […]
The US has already tried registering Muslims. It didn’t work.
I reported on a Muslim registry in the US almost 15 years ago, after 9/11. It never occurred to me, once the Bush administration quietly stopped pursuing the program, that I would have an occasion to report on it again. But here we are. Since this story ran, the Obama administration has taken the National Security […]
I moved to Minneapolis for Prince
On the day of Prince’s death, I wrote a remembrance. I don’t remember not listening to Prince. After college, I got my first job in Los Angeles and moved into a motel-turned-apartment on La Cienega Boulevard. The street was busy and, like most of my neighbors had experienced at one time or another, my old […]