On March 18, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) closed all of its field offices to public-facing activities due to the coronavirus, effectively putting much of legal immigration to the United States on pause, including naturalization interviews and oath ceremonies. As the months went by, other federal and state agencies turned to virtual infrastructure for their activities, but ...
Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened. But the machine Nocco built has turned into a system of organized harassment, according to a new investigation by grantees Neil Bedi and Kathleen McGrory at the Tampa Bay Times. Deputies swarm homes in ...
The pandemic has presented universities a triple whammy: Reduced tax revenues slashing government support, online-only courses gutting dormitory and cafeteria revenues, and – with more students and families out of work – less ability to offset those losses with tuition increases.FIJ grantee Miranda Spivack’s report, published in USA Today, details how the pandemic’s economic impact on universities could create more ...
A National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study that demonstrated how a modernized American power grid could accelerate the growth of wind and solar energy and reduce reliance on coal was suppressed by Trump appointees in order to help the coal industry, according to FIJ grantee Peter Fairley’s report for InvestigateWest, also published in The Atlantic.The study, as Fairley reports, was ...
In California and other states across the country, the COVID-19 pandemic is hampering the child welfare system. A patchwork of new rules and guidelines meant to slow the spread of the virus has relaxed requirements for face-to-face meetings between caseworkers investigating abuse and children, leaving vulnerable children out of sight and caseworkers stuck at home.In their story, published in the ...
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. ...