The Ballad of Lidia Terrazas
Meet America's Most Relentless Immigration Reporter
WASHINGTON — Lidia Terrazas couldn’t answer my questions today.
That’s my whole column here, really, right there in that one sentence. But since you came this far, let me explain what I mean.
I had a list of them. Good ones, I thought. The kind of questions you ask a journalist you’re profiling — where she grew up, what drew her to this work, what it feels like to be Mexican-born and reporting on what the United States government is doing to Mexican families in real-time in 2026. The kind of questions that give a column like this its color and its texture and its little human moments that make readers feel like they know somebody.
She didn’t have time for any of it.
Who is Lidia Terrazas?
Lidia Terrazas — national correspondent for Univision, Sinaloense by birth, cherry-picker in the fields of Yakima by early-American biography, investigative journalism master’s degree by Walter Cronkite School training — was at a hospital somewhere in Mexico when I reached out. She was there with Juan Nicolás, a two-month-old baby who has been a tragedy teetering on the brink of catastrophe for the better part of a month now. She told me she would follow the story all the way to Guatemala if that’s what it takes for it to have a happy ending.
Good news is incredibly rare on the immigration beat these days, her relentless pursuit of the story on such a brutal news beat is commendable and uplifting. Watch:
Here is what you need to know about Juan Nicolás, because every great reporter eventually becomes inseparable from the story they refuse to let die. The baby is two months old. Two months. He came into this world and within eight weeks of breathing air, the United States government had him behind the fences of the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, the place Rep. Joaquin Castro has called “a kind of trailer prison” and “a concentration camp for children.” Juan was there with his mother Mireya, his father, and his sixteen-month-old sister, which means the oldest person in that immediate family unit was old enough to have been walking for maybe four months.
He developed bronchitis in there. He was vomiting. He couldn’t breathe right. His mother reported he was choking on his own vomit. She took him to the medical area and was told there was no doctor available. They gave her a nasal aspirator. They checked him for fever. They monitored him the way you monitor a parking meter, and sent them back.
Eventually — eventually — he was rushed out by ambulance on a Monday night to a hospital in Texas. Diagnosed with bronchitis. At some point during his stay, the baby was unresponsive. Around midnight they discharged him anyway and sent him back to Dilley.
By Tuesday morning, his mother was in front of an immigration judge. By that afternoon, the whole family — Juan, Mireya, the father, the sixteen-month-old sister — had been deported to Mexico with whatever money was left in their commissary account. About a hundred and ninety dollars. Two hundred if they were lucky. That’s what the United States government spent to make that particular problem go away. Two hundred dollars and a plane ride.
This is where Lidia Terrazas comes in, which is to say this is where she was already standing. She didn’t write about the family from a press briefing or a congressional statement or a carefully worded ICE spokesperson email. She went to Mexico. She found them at their hotel. She sat with Mireya and she documented what “practically abandoned” looks like up close — a sick infant, a depleted commissary balance, a family trying to figure out whether to go to Guatemala, the father’s country, to try to build something from the rubble of what just happened to them.
She has been doing this work for years now. You may have seen her videos from immigration courts in San Antonio, the ones where families collapse in courthouse hallways after ICE takes someone away. You may have seen her reporting on Carmen Herrera, a mother of five American daughters with multiple pending status cases, arrested on her way out of court. Those videos went everywhere — millions of views on TikTok and Instagram — because Terrazas understood instinctively that the story for a national correspondent is rarely the policy itself. The story is always the person standing in the rubble of the policy.
She grew up in Sinaloa. She picked cherries in Yakima, Washington, after she came to this country. She has said publicly that she once feared her own family could lose their legal status. She took that fear and she turned it into a master’s degree and a national correspondent’s credential and a willingness to drive across an international border and walk into a hotel room where a two-month-old baby is still sick from what happened to him inside an American detention facility.
There’s a school of journalism that believes the reporter must remain detached. Neutral. Professionally removed from the human wreckage they are paid to describe. It is a fine theory. It looks very dignified in an ethics textbook.
Lidia Terrazas is practicing a different school. It’s older, actually. It’s the school where you go find the family. Where you stay on the story past the point where the rest of the press corps has moved on to the next outrage. Where you tell me, when I ask you for a comment for a column, that you can’t talk right now because you are at a hospital in Mexico and you plan to follow this story all the way to Guatemala if that’s what it takes.
Guatemala. She said it like it was perfectly obvious. Like there was never any question. And now, because of Lidia Terrazas and the story she refused to abandon, something happened that almost never happens on this beat.
People noticed. People reached out. People opened their wallets.
A GoFundMe page was launched for Juan Nicolás and his family, and as of this writing it has raised over eighty thousand dollars. Let that number sit for a moment. Eighty thousand dollars for a family that crossed into Mexico with two hundred dollars in commissary funds and a sick infant. Eighty thousand dollars is over fifteen times the average annual earnings of a working-class person in Guatemala, the country where this family may yet try to build a life.
Fifteen times a year’s wages. Raised by strangers who saw a two-month-old baby and recognized what the government had done to him and decided they weren’t going to look away.
That is the impact of Lidia Terrazas.
Because none of it — not the GoFundMe, not the eighty thousand dollars, not the public outrage, not Joaquin Castro on the phone with the family, not any of it — happens if she doesn’t get in her car and cross that border and find them. This story of atrocity and indifference and neglect and abuse is also, because of her, a story about perseverance. It might yet have a happy ending for the immigrants at the center of it. That is as rare as it gets on this beat in this era. That is what accountability journalism is supposed to do but almost never gets the chance to deliver.
Juan Nicolás is two months old. He has been through things that no two-month-old should survive, and he has survived them so far, which means the story is not over, which means Lidia Terrazas is not done.
Neither is the immigration beat. Neither, sadly, is any of the human carnage of the Trump administration’s xenophobic policy rampage.
But at least someone is in the room with Juan Nicolás and his family.
Thank you Pablo for sharing this story! And thanks so much to Lidia for all her work! Now I'm off to the GoFundMe page!!
“… if that’s what it takes for a happy ending …”. What a powerful, hopeful, gritty vision, Lidia and her ballpoint pen and her commitment …
What a wonderful conversation you will have with her up ahead, Pablo. Gracias.