DePaul Bets on Journalism Education as a Weapon Against ICE
A new institute built for community storytellers launches alongside a platform documenting federal abuses — and neither is backing down.
WASHINGTON — DePaul University’s College of Communication officially launched its Institute for Journalism and Racial Justice that Wednesday, unveiled before an audience of students, freelancers, and community storytellers in the same breath as a platform designed to document what the federal government has been doing to Chicago since Operation Midway Blitz began last September — a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity that has left hundreds arrested, families split across state lines, and at least one man, Silverio Villegas-González, dead.
The timing was not an accident.
“Journalism matters, especially right now,” DePaul College of Communication Dean Alexandra Murphy said. “It matters who tells the story, how stories are framed, and how communities are understood.”
The institute — built through a formal partnership between DePaul and Public Narrative, a Chicago nonprofit focused on diversifying voices in the news — is years in the making. Professor Judith McCray, DePaul’s senior professional in residence, started sketching the idea with community partners long before Operation Midway Blitz had a name. The baseline research alone surveyed 268 freelancers and 280 media organizations. By last year, it was a formal proposal sitting on the dean’s desk.
McCray is direct about what she wants the institute to do — and equally direct about why the word “racial” appears in its name, and not the softer, more palatable “social.”
“If there are actions that are happening that are about social change or about people of color or marginalized communities, we also have a responsibility to cover that as well, even if the counterargument is the authorities,” McCray told La DePaulia.
The institute is open to DePaul students, early-career journalists, and community storytellers from neighboring universities. Its first public event is a freelancing bootcamp this spring — AP style, interviewing, networking. The fundamentals. The tools of the trade that no one ever taught the people who are living the stories.
“I want to expand the playing field for what they have opportunities to do, especially in independent and hyperlocal media,” McCray said.
Seated beside DePaul journalism professor and former ABC Nightline correspondent Chris Bury at the launch was former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who used the occasion to brief attendees on ReportICEnow.com — a crowd-sourced platform she built to document alleged abuses by federal immigration agents during Midway Blitz. Users submit reports, photos, and video. A two-level review team checks credibility. An AI tool screens for manipulated footage. Eleven incidents are publicly viewable. More are coming.
Lightfoot is clear-eyed about the stakes — and about the quiet support she is getting from donors too frightened to say so publicly. Many of the community organizations backing the project, she said, have already received IRS audit letters they believe are White House-directed retaliation.
“They are very much involved in helping us spread the word, legitimizing the work that we are doing,” Lightfoot said. “And so I’ve got to respect when someone says to me, ‘I can’t be public in embracing you, but I’m 100% supportive.’”
She described ReportICEnow.com as something built for permanence — not just a tool for today’s lawsuit or tomorrow’s congressional hearing, but a record.
“My hope is that it will be a permanent archive of what happened in this moment,” Lightfoot said — “something journalists, historians, prosecutors and law enforcement can use now and as a historical teaching tool about the injustices that occurred and how ordinary residents stood up and said, ‘Not on my watch.’”
From Washington, the picture is familiar: an administration using the machinery of the federal government — enforcement operations, audits, funding threats — to silence the people documenting what it is doing. Chicago is not the first city to have felt this. It will not be the last.
What is different here is the response. A former mayor building an evidence archive. A Catholic university planting a journalism institute in the middle of a federal crackdown. Fifty people in folding chairs, deciding to keep records.
That is not nothing. In a moment when the government is counting on silence, it is, in fact, quite a lot.
