Immigration Series

The Dallas Morning News
05/1/2020

The Dallas Morning News has been committed to covering immigration for decades. In 2019, as migrants died in detention and while trying to cross the border and as immigrants and U.S. and Mexican citizens were massacred at an El Paso Wal-Mart, we intensified our efforts, increasing resources in both people and travel to cover this important national story.

Why these examples? Our approach was simple: We wanted to break news that other media had not yet explored. We believe we were the first news organization to do in-depth reporting on discontent among the rank-and-file in the Border Patrol and were among the first to explore video justice in the immigration courts. We were reporting on a pileup of Mexican asylum seekers along the border long before other mainstream media got onboard. Sourcing and traditional shoe-leather reporting infused our work. For example, Alfredo Corchado worked for months to gain the confidence of rank-and-file Border Patrol agents and camped outside the Border Patrol union station until one of the top officials invited him to talk off record (followed by on-the-record interviews).

Within days of the publication of our story on conditions in the Border Patrol, Aaron Hull, the sector chief, was removed from his post. Dianne Solis had already chronicled years of increasing chaos in the immigration courts (and was the first to report that federal agencies were telling immigrants they had to appear in court only to discover from judges that they were fake court dates). When news filtered in that video conferencing would spread through tent courts along the border, Solis knew it was time to build on past coverage and explore how video conferencing was working out in courts where it had been introduced months earlier. Our reporting on the complicated, opaque immigration courts likely played a role in the partial opening to media of the previously closed tent courts in Brownsville, from where judges adjudicate immigration cases by video.

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Submitted by Chelsea Watkins.