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‘There Are Ways to Uplift the Resilience of Communities’ - CounterSpin interview with Tina Vasquez on covering immigration
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Janine Jackson interviewed Tina Vasquez about covering immigration for the April 26, 2019, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Janine Jackson: Babies pulled crying from their mother’s arms. Asylum-seekers detained under a highway overpass. Government officials tracking the menstrual cycles of teenage migrants to better prevent them from accessing legal abortions. ICE swarming workplaces and loading people into vans.
Reporting on immigration in Trump-time presents a whack-a-mole of cruelty and crazy, and the job of prioritizing and presenting it for a limited-attention span public, already overloaded on outrage.
With Trump planning to make immigration policy a prime emphasis in the next election, media’s prism, media choices, may matter very much. What should we keep in mind as we see that reporting, and what might fall through the gaps? We’re joined now by Tina Vasquez, the senior immigration reporter at Rewire.News. She joins us by phone from North Carolina. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Tina Vasquez.
Tina Vasquez: Thank you for having me.
JJ: Let’s start with Kirstjen Nielsen, just resigned as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a key executor of Trump immigration policies. You didn’t start reporting on immigration with Nielsen, or with Trump. So how would you place her tenure in the scheme of things, in terms of impact?
TV: What I think is really interesting is now, under the Trump administration, you see journalists reaching out to people like Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary under the Obama administration. And during Jeh Johnson’s time, Obama was deporting more people than any other time in his administration. We were quickly deporting asylum seekers that were newly arrived, that were from Central America, so a very similar situation to now. And now they’re deferring to him as an expert to comment on Trump’s inhumane policies.
So when Kirstjen Nielsen announced that she was resigning, that’s kind of where my brain went. I worry about the ways that we forget, and the ways that we normalize the things that DHS secretaries oversee.
And under Nielsen, of course, there was the family separation policy, that she lied to Congress about, that was actually in play much, much longer than we knew previously; it was almost a year where they were separating families. Some of it was a pilot program at certain areas along the border, but we still don’t know how many families were subjected to that policy.
And I worry about the way that she will become normalized and, you know, have a fellowship at a university or write a book or do speaking engagements. Like, I’m very curious to see how that’s going to take shape for her.
JJ: I have to say, the way that you keep hold of a timeline and of the history is so critical, because you can only do that when you focus on impacts and on people, rather than just looking at the folks at the top.
TV: Sure.
JJ: Yeah, you have to keep your eyes on what’s actually happening.
Well, you’ve reported earlier this month that under the Trump administration, there has been a shift in how ICE treats pregnant migrants in federal custody. And then, in a different story, you reported about how black, undocumented women in Philadelphia face barriers to maternity care.
So for one—it’s kind of two questions—for one, there is a particular story in the impact of punitive immigration policies on women, and on pregnant women, isn’t there? And then, the other thing that this underscores for me, is that immigration isn’t just a border story, and we have to remember that.
TV: So I kind of write at the intersection of immigrant justice and reproductive justice. And there’s a lot of reporting that needs to be done at that intersection. So much of immigration reporting now is focused at what’s happening to the border, what did Trump tweet, but there have been some very harmful policy changes under the Trump administration, that have gotten some media attention, but, in my opinion, not enough. And [one is] the treatment of pregnant people in custody.
Whereas before, as part of ICE’s normal processing, women who were between the ages of 10 and 56 would be given a pregnancy test. And if that pregnancy test came back positive, they would be released from detention relatively quickly. And that is no longer the policy.
So now we’re detaining pregnant people. And there’s been a lot of reporting about in-custody deaths, and negligent medical care that people in detention receive; now we are subjecting pregnant people to that kind of care.
Tina Vasquez: “So what does prenatal care look like when you are subjected to indefinite detention? What does giving birth look like when you’re subjected to indefinite detention? What happens to your child after you give birth, when you have to return to the detention center?”
So what does prenatal care look like when you are subjected to indefinite detention? What does giving birth look like when you’re subjected to indefinite detention? What happens to your child after you give birth, when you have to return to the detention center? So those are the kind of questions that I’m now poking at and wondering, now that this new policy is in place under the Trump administration.
JJ: And you note that miscarriages appear to be on an increase, which might be natural to associate with this change in care.
TV: I’ve been working on a piece since last year that is now finally in editing. But it’s about other harmful practices that we’re seeing under the Trump administration, that we’ve seen with incarcerated women for a very long time.
There is movement now to end shackling in prisons. We don’t know if that translates to detention centers. But I’ve been in touch with a doctor in Texas who says that women who are pregnant and detained by ICE are shackled during childbirth, when accessing prenatal care, when accessing postpartum care. There’s just a lot of alarming things that I’m learning about how this is taking shape.
JJ: Let me just ask you, what’s it like trying to get information from an agency like ICE, when you’re asking, you know, “How are you treating pregnant women in federal care,” for example, “in federal custody?” What’s it like trying to extract information from the agency?
TV: It’s impossible. It is very clear that you’re given sort of a template, boilerplate response. If I have very particular questions, I’m asking about a very particular person’s case, or something that a doctor told me at a very particular facility, it’s just cut-and-pasted. You know, “This is the number of pregnant people that we had in detention in August 2018. Here are links to our standards of care.” And that’s kind of the end of it. And so you are forced to find other ways to gather information to piece things together.
Of course, people who tell me what happened to them, I always believe them. And they’re the experts on what’s happening in detention centers. But as a journalist, you have to reach out to ICE, and you have to give them the opportunity to respond, and hopefully provide information. And that just doesn’t happen.
JJ: That’s actually something that I wanted to follow up with. My litany at the beginning might also have included the state trying to hold unaccompanied migrant children at toxic waste sites, which is another thing that you’ve reported earlier this year. You write about policy and people, and I just wonder, how do you determine where the individual narrative is crucial, or most useful, and when statistics or political history or some kind of bigger picture might be necessary? Or is that just—journalism?
TV: I’m sure it’s different for different people. The way that I approach it first is with people. A person tells me, “This is what happened to me.” And then I start poking at the context for that. When do we know that this started happening? Under what administrations has this happened? How did this policy that made this happen take shape?
So people first, then providing context for people to better understand what is happening to that person. That’s kind of the formula I use for reporting.
JJ: Well, and some of your reporting reflects community solidarity and community resistance. And that’s very much part of the story of this immigration situation that we’re in, and particularly when you write from North Carolina, about community response to ICE workplace raids, for example, there’s a whole story in what happens to communities once people are removed, or that are being targeted for raids, and that community story, I think, maybe is not always told.
TV: I know that that’s something that I would like to get better at, it’s something that I would like to see immigration reporting at large get better at, is, under this administration in particular, it can feel very hard. I used to say, there’s no time for happy stories, right? You’re being pummeled by all of this bad news. It doesn’t make sense to write a happy story.
But what I’m coming to understand about my own reporting is there are ways to highlight and showcase the resilience of communities, and the way that they’re fighting back.
So when I wrote a story about a black undocumented woman, and what it was like for her to access prenatal care, that sounds like a hard, sad story. But it wasn’t. She, despite having very few resources, figured it out, and went from Philadelphia to New York City on a train several times a month, to access care in a state that had friendlier benefits to undocumented immigrants.
There’s a black woman I interview in the piece, who has decided to become a doula in order to fight back against the crisis that black pregnant women are experiencing when it comes to maternal health. So there are ways to uplift the resilience of communities, and the ways they’re fighting back, without hitting people over the head with it. And just being very intentional about how to include that in your reporting, I think, is becoming more and more important.
JJ: Well, there’s much more we could talk about, but I’d like to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Tina Vasquez. She’s senior immigration reporter at Rewire.News. Thank you so much, Tina Vasquez, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
TV: Thank you.
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