WASHINGTON — Election night, 2024. Perfect weather. Nightmare outcome. The crowd at Howard University was waiting for a woman who was not coming out. They watched the stage. They watched their phones. Then they stopped watching anything.
I was in that crowd. I had come to cover a win. That isn’t how it went. Harris never came out. Around dusk, I understood why. Donald Trump was going to win. Stephen Miller was going to get the keys. He had spent ten years building a machine to punch down on migrant families. Now he would get to run it.
I know those families. They are the best of this country. They work the hardest and complain the least. They fight in our wars, and so do their kids. They are proud to vote and proud to serve. They were going to pay for this election. They have. Millions would be terrorized in the brutality to follow I knew as walked out of Howard that night across town to my apartment brimming with purpose.
A few weeks earlier I’d created a Substack called Migrant Insider, one of many I’ve created over the years that went nowhere. This one, I knew this newsletter was going to make a difference — and it has — because I was ready to swing big, so I did.
The pitches that died on the desk
For years, I had pitched immigration beat stories to the magazine I freelanced for. The pitches died on the desk. Some of that was on me. This is a howling, emotional beat, and I was howling at busy editors to care.
But some of it was the moment. Nobody in the rooms I worked in saw what I saw. The lies about immigrants were about to become policy. Most people thought Harris would win. So did I. Nobody thought her win would be a great day for immigrants. But Trump was the sum of all fears.
Biden had tried, and I’ll give him that. He tried to make the system fairer. People inside his own administration turned him back. By the end, ceded the entire Overton Window through death by a thousand policy paper cuts in a federal bureaucracy with enormous discretion concentrated in the executive branch.
Two families, two centuries
I was born in Chile under Pinochet. My family ran from him. We landed in Missouri and made a life.
We weren’t the first in the family to make that trip. My mother was a Sullivan, born and raised in Missouri. Her people left Ireland a hundred years before we left Chile. They came for the reason everybody comes: for the kids, for the grandkids. For me, as it turned out.
A Latino who got here in the 1980s. An Irish family that got here in the 1880s. I grew up with both. When you grow up like that, you learn to hear xenophobia early. You hear it in the first syllable. I still do.
Year one: the lane was wide open
Migrant Insider began in a news vaccuum. The big outlets had quit trying on the immigration beat. The small rarely covered migrants at all. Everyone took the invasion talk at face value. Once in a while someone ran a low-traffic piece about the good immigrants do, and called it balance.
The Spanish-language networks used to carry the migrant point of view. Then they went chasing ratings. They started selling MAGA to their own audiences.
So the lane was open, and we drove into it. Last year, Migrant Insider became Univision in English. A gringo Telemundo. A migrant Politico. Axios for immigration.
We scooped right away. In its last days, advocates begged Biden administration to protect the people who would be hit first in the highly foreseeable national nightmare of acrid politics, forged into batshit policy. We had that story.
In 2025, Trump’s first year back, we owned the beat. We broke more news than anybody. We fact-checked Congress, Homeland Security and the White House, out loud, every day. By the end of that year, we were the most significant publication on the immigration beat.
Year two: caught, and glad of it
Then the others showed up: our news competitors.
They noticed we were eating their lunch. They figured out immigration was a story. Not a talking point about white grievance. A story, with people in it.
This year they caught us. Some passed us. There are immigration reporters out there better than me. There are outlets breaking more news on this beat than we do.
We still land scoops, and we land them often. But a source with something good now has a whole galaxy of places to take it, and reporters they can trust. That didn’t exist two years ago.
I’d like to think we set the standard. I don’t see how anybody argues otherwise.
We set it because we saw it coming. Most people never believed the talk would turn into policy. It did. Congress gave Homeland Security $170 billion for mass deportations. Magnitudes greater than any funding an agency that small, young, and dumb could ever spend responsibly.
So they spend it on grift. They hire people you wouldn’t trust to write a parking ticket and sent them into neighborhoods. Any American with sense who isn’t marching in a party line has quit believing mass deportation keeps us safe.
The toll
This beat takes something out of you. For every story I scoop, thousands go by that will never be reported. The dead are many. So are the raped. Torture is systemizing in detention centers. No press can cover it all. So we cover what I can.
Depressed is how I cover this daily grind, but hopeful still with the blood of two migrant families a century apart infused with old-school, grim and practical American optimism, a sacred flame I stoke and protect in my hobbies and editorial work.
What comes next
The midterms are just three weeks away.
If Democrats take the House, Stephen Miller will be investigated like never before. Most Americans have turned on ICE. Plenty have turned on the whole department. They see it now for what it is: state-sponsored terror, and we pay for it. If Dems win either chamber, I’ll be on the Hill covering the new majorities, chasing the details of what they uncover.
If Republicans hold on, we follow the money. We’ll track every dollar that moves through Congress to keep ICE and DHS on steroids. They use that money to terrorize migrant families, and more and more, American citizens too. And no one covers ICE funding like Migrant Insider. That’s a lane we continue to own.
How to keep this going
I can’t do this without you.
If you subscribe, thank you. You proved something the big shots in Washington news always said couldn’t be done. An immigration beat can pay for itself. It doesn’t have to live inside a labor beat, like at Politico, or get scattered across politics and economics. It can stand on its own.
If you don’t subscribe, do. Then tell a friend.
I also have to take care of myself. After a bad story, my head is wreckage. These are my people. They are scared and they are hurting. I’m a proud American citizen. I won’t live scared. Instead I’ll break news, so if you have a story nobody else has, find me on Signal at pab.202. Tell me what you know. Those are the stories I move on fastest and hardest.
That goes double for Congress: staffers, members and lobbyists. You often know this beat better than I do. I often have the bigger platform. Let’s use both.
Two years ago, I walked out of Howard with a purpose. I still have it. It weighs more now as the federal war on migrants continues to escalate. So for you free subscribers reading this, your support as we begin our third year of this fine American muckraker of a newsletter, is direct investment in punching up from the right side of history.
Thank you.
“Harris never came out.” Thankfully, Pablo did. And endures still! Thx
That selfie is extraordinary. It's the eyes.