Grantees’ Stories

For five months, President Donald Trump’s administration has closed and blocked asylum at the US-Mexico border. This has left countless asylum seekers dangerously and indefinitely stuck — without a clear path forward, according to FIJ grantee William Martin’s report for The New Humanitarian. His article and ten minute documentary follows the story of 20-year-old transgender migrant Alejandra and her journey ...

Private companies are cashing in on transporting immigrants around the country and the world. And their profits are poised to grow as the Trump administration seeks a new influx of money for the already growing unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that handles the flights. FIJ grant recipient Angelika Albaladejo investigated ICE Air’s costly expansion and found that the opaque ...

Climate change is killing Americans. Heat now causes more deaths than hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods in most years, creating a new public health threat. But health departments aren’t equipped to respond. FIJ grant recipient Bridget Hickey and colleagues Ali Raj, Dean Russell, Elisabeth Gawthrop, and Veronica Penney from Columbia Journalism Investigations used data, reviewed thousands of pages of government records, ...

FIJ grantee Derek Kravitz and his team at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation have just released an online repository of local, state and federal public records obtained through open-records requests called Documenting COVID-19. The new site allows users to search for relevant document sets and records by state or thematic tags. So far, Kravitz and his team have compiled ...

Two dozen Colombians who had been in the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for several months, were sent home as part of an ICE sped-up repatriation program last May. Unknown to the deportees, they had become infected with COVID-19. In the first piece of a multi-part investigation for palabra, FIJ grantee Jenny Manrique Cortes tracked some of the victims. ...

As the novel coronavirus continued to spread across the D.C. region in early spring, social workers at the district’s child protective services agency began to panic: Their bosses appeared oblivious to the toll this would take on their workforce. Dozens of sick or symptomatic employees, knockoff N95 masks, and COVID-19-positive foster children staying overnight at agency headquarters — in violation ...

For the better part of the last decade, FIJ grantee Erika Cohn, a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning director/producer, has worked to shine a light on reproductive and human rights violations inside the walls of California’s women’s prisons. In 2010, Cohn began following the work of Cynthia Chandler, an activist lawyer, and Kelli Dillon, a woman who was involuntarily sterilized at ...

Nearly 11 million acres of indigenous land. Approximately 250 tribes, bands and communities. Over 160 violence-backed treaties and land seizures. Fifty-two universities. From High Country News’ Indigenous Affairs desk comes “Land-Grab Universities,” a unique reporting project funded in part by FIJ that untangles the powerful and painful strains of myth and money behind the land-grant university system, largely credited with ...

 A small police training company owned by Chicago officers, the International Tactical Training Association (ITTA), has been training units of the police of El Salvador in the use of force, according to a recent report by FIJ grantee Danielle Mackey.According to Mackey’s investigation, the training has no oversight from either the U.S. or Salvadoran governments, although ITTA appears to have ...

A counter-extremism grant program funded and administered by the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security lacked transparency and deepened government mistrust among some minority communities it targeted, according to a report by FIJ grantee Julia Harte in The Nation magazine.  As Harte reports, two-thirds of the applications chosen by the Trump administration focused on immigrants or Muslims, mostly ignoring domestic ...