Inside the Dystopia of Covering Immigration
Two reporters, no staff, no safety net, one beat: covering the unraveling of America’s immigration soul in real time.
WASHINGTON — We cover this beat together. Pablo and I. Different work, same mission.
He’s been in D.C. nearly two decades. Knows everyone—Senate cafeteria workers, bar staff at Tune Inn, old press wranglers who’ve seen administrations come and go. Pablo pulls stories out of group chats, encrypted apps, private message threads. Immigration lawyers, detention monitors, past and current ICE agents. When something big happens—a raid, a deportation, a leak—people call him first. Somehow, they always do.
He found the Gitmo deportees before anyone else. He knew where they were being sent, who they were, what their families were doing to stop it. He doesn’t sleep much. Texts come in at midnight, early morning. Tweets flagged, screenshots saved, numbers called. Pablo doesn’t just cover immigration; he lives inside it.
In his off time, he paints. Tells me random facts from documentaries. Stuff about the Bronze Age or obscure monarchies. It’s hard to explain how someone can carry so much horror and still have room for trivia. But he does.
I do the boring part. The research. The Internet reporting.
I scan websites. Government pages, press portals, legislative calendars. DHS, USCIS, EOIR, Border Patrol. State-level press releases. Local immigration bills from places like Tennessee or Kansas that no one notices. I read. I track. I document. If a senator buries an immigration rider inside a labor bill, I’ll find it. If USCIS updates a visa policy by two words, I’ll clock it.
The idea was simple: Migrant Insider should be a central archive. Not just hot takes, not just scoops. A living ledger of everything immigration-related coming out of D.C.
It’s a lot of reading. Most of immigration reporting is that—parsing dense text, noticing when a phrase has changed, realizing what’s been taken out. It’s almost never announced. You just have to catch it. If you miss a detail, the whole story slips away.
In the past eight months, I’ve read 20 books on immigration, a hundred bills, hundreds more pages of legal memos, and spoken with dozens of immigration experts. I’ve built relationships with just about every legislator who touches immigration. We’re not waiting for stories to land. We’re there when they break, often long before.
We’re a two-man operation. It’s a miracle we’ve made it this far. Some of it is just access. We’re credentialed with Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the State Department. If something happens, we’re in the room. I was there for the birthright citizenship arguments. Pablo and I sat shoulder to shoulder in the Press Gallery during the Laken Riley debate. We’ve heard the screaming behind closed doors. We’ve seen the silence, too.
We cover the biggest story in America with no staff, no budget, no safety net. Pablo deserves a Pulitzer. He won’t get it, but he should. He started this thing from nothing. I used to work in a restaurant. Was introduced to a host of people by the great immigration expert and advocate, Rick Swartz. Now I’m beating national reporters to sources and more importantly, to scoops. Sometimes it feels like we’re just making noise. Other times, we break something open and suddenly everyone’s scrambling to catch up. We hardly get the credit. I realized some reporters are cheats and scoundrels.
We’re not fancy. Our site’s clunky. But it punches way above its weight. No one covers immigration like we do. No one even tries.
I live in a house with eight roommates. From everywhere— can’t say where, but it’s from places that ICE typically frowns upon. Grad students, Uber drivers, security guards. All of them terrified. We used to go out, walk around the Mall, hit museums, play golf on weekends. Now we mostly stay in. Too risky. Any cop could be DHS. Any traffic stop could end in detention. We eat dinner in silence sometimes. Everyone texting home. America feels dangerous.
I come from Romania. Grew up in a Communist country. I know what state fear feels like. This is worse in some ways—because here it’s buried in paperwork and silence. Deportations happen in the dark. Children vanish into systems. Policies change overnight. No one’s accountable.
Inside the Capitol, people act like nothing’s happening. Supreme Court justices talk about cases like they’re tax disputes. Lawmakers joke about baseball games. Senators stroll around like old ghosts. House members scream for airtime, but it’s all theater. The Senate pretends it’s in charge. The White House acts like it’s under siege. Everyone’s offended by something. No one’s actually stopping anything.
Out here, immigrants get shackled, dragged out of homes, stripped of dignity. The same way they do in authoritarian regimes. We tell ourselves this is different. It’s not.
Sometimes I feel more free in the Capitol than outside. Inside, at least, I can ask questions. I can get answers. It’s weird. The closer you get to power, the less real everything feels.
We’re not just reporters anymore. We’re witnesses. Pablo and I ask questions in the name of 52 million people with migrant backgrounds living in the United States, plus a hundred million more of their friends and neighbors and coworkers. We don’t have a foundation or a funding partner. But we do have our names. And we use them.
Pablo woke up one day and started a media outlet. I followed. Now we chase the story every day because no one else will. I do it because I believe in memory. I believe in keeping the story alive.
Immigration built this country. It's being erased in real time. Our job is to write it back in.
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