Introducing the Class of 2024: A Spotlight on Deportation in the U.S. with Caitlin Dickerson

This month, the New America Fellows Program announced the Class of 2024 National Fellows. An impressive group of 15 scholars, journalists, and filmmakers were selected from a pool of hundreds of applicants. Over the course of their fellowships, the 2024 National Fellows will explore issues including intergenerational caregiving, deportation, Islamophobia, psychedelics and the mental health industry, reproductive healthcare, and more.

One of this year’s talented fellows is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Caitlin Dickerson. Dickerson’s deeply reported work on topics related to immigration and deportation compellingly illuminate and break down these complex subjects for all readers.

In this extended Q&A from The Fifth Draft — the National Fellows Program’s newsletter featuring exclusive content about and from our Fellows — Class of 2024 Fellow Caitlin Dickerson gave us insight into her forthcoming project about deportation in the United States. Sign up for The Fifth Draft to hear how the world's best storytellers find ideas that change the world.

Your Fellows Project will be a book that explores deportation in the United States. Can you share the genesis of this project?

The idea for this book began to percolate as I was reporting some of my first stories about immigration, while I was at NPR during the Obama administration. I realized that a lot of immigration writing led up to the moment when a person was either deported or not, but us journalists were rarely sticking around to find out what happened afterward. Over the years, I also became increasingly interested in how effectively immigrant labor — and in particular, unauthorized immigrant labor — is hidden from public view, as well as how the powerful law enforcement lobby perpetuates the status quo. I decided I wanted to try to tell that story comprehensively, through intimate narrative writing and deep research, in a way that depoliticizes the issue as much as possible, while making clear that it impacts almost every American and American community.

You won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting for your piece on the separation of migrant children from their parents during the Trump administration. How does that work tie into your book project?

The book won’t draw directly from my reporting on family separation but they’re certainly connected. The best way to explain this is to quote loosely from my Fellows project proposal, which talks about those early journalistic encounters I had with families that were impacted by deportation: “As I went on to spend years covering other issues — dismal conditions inside massive detention centers, asylum seekers expelled to their deaths, the forced wrenching of children from their parents — it became clear to me that these phenomena flowed outward and resulted from the core of our nation’s immigration system: deportation. The more I learned about how and why that system was built, the clearer it became that immigration status can prove as critical as socioeconomics, gender, or race in carving the trajectory of a person’s life.”

In your book, you will delve into the multi-billion dollar deportation industry, with a particular focus on immense immigrant detention facilities. How did you gain access to these facilities? What challenges did you face researching and reporting on them?

Gaining access to detention facilities isn’t easy but it’s something I’ve done before. It involves negotiations with the government and, if the facility is privately run, the corporation that owns it. Reporting in carceral settings is always difficult because of all the restrictions on who can enter and what you can bring inside. Even when you’re allowed in, you’re often stuck in a small box of a room without the ability to record, and sometimes, without even the ability to take handwritten notes. But a lot of great reporting has been done through a combination of in-person visits and then speaking with detainees by phone or video message, as well as with facility staff during non-work hours, so that’s what I plan to do.

You have worked in radio and podcasts as well as print journalism. How does your process differ for each medium? Do you prefer one over the other for certain types of stories?

Add video to that list. I think every story has an ideal medium in which to be told, but I also like repurposing stories in multiple formats, because it can vastly expand the reach and impact of your reporting.

Compared to other forms of storytelling, a print author has much more creative control, of course, because the quotation-to-written-copy ratio is by far the greatest. And you can cram a lot more information like characters and data, not to mention graphic elements, into a book or article, because readers can put it down if they need a break and then return to it later, or look back at a prior page to remind themselves of something they forgot or were confused by (though ideally, they never become confused!). Video interests me because it opens up access to a vast and important audience of people who just don’t have the time, ability, or sufficient interest for print works or podcasts, no matter how well executed they are. Audio is also very dear to me. I don’t think there’s anything more moving than the sound of a person’s voice. Forget the actual words, the voice itself carries so much information through tone, pauses, breaths, gasps. I think there’s something universal about the voice, which can be really important when you’re covering a polarizing issue. In my opinion, this is why it took an audio file of crying children that was leaked to ProPublica for family separation to become an international scandal despite all the print stories that I and other reporters (including the ones at ProPublica who got the audio) had been writing about the issue for months.

How do you hope your book will contribute to policy and the ongoing debate around deportation and immigration in the United States?

My hope is that shedding light on the reality of our relationship to immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization — which is actually much more symbiotic than it is often portrayed — will help people to see the issue with fresh eyes. I also hope to arm readers with the information they need to push back against the lazy talking points that are often employed by politicians on both sides of the aisle to score points by blaming each other for various aspects of the system that aren’t working while dodging any sense of responsibility for fixing it.

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