Virginia company charged with trafficking Central American children and forcing them to work at a commercial laundry overnight. One 13-year-old girl was told she'd be killed if she didn't work. pilotonline.com/2023/08/09/4-s…

Expert inspectors found "barbaric" and "negligent" conditions inside ICE detention centers. The government - under both Trump and Biden - fought to keep their findings secret. So NPR and I filed a FOIA lawsuit, and can now make these records public. npr.org/2023/08/16/119…

🧵Last yr, 250,000 ppl crossed the Darién jungle in a desperate attempt to make it to the US. This year, that number has already reached 360k. Federico Rios and I have returned again & again to the jungle, trying to understand this flow. Some anecdotes from our latest reporting.

14-year-old Marcos Cux had his arm shredded at a Perdue slaughterhouse in Virginia last year. The plant was full of migrant kids working in violation of child labor laws. The whole town heard about the accident. But even teachers and police kept it quiet.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/mag…

Biden's measure making half a million Venezuelans eligible for work permits will alleviate pressure on New York and other cities. But expect many would-be migrants to see this as a sign that migrating to the U.S, no matter how it's done, pays off wsj.com/us-news/biden-… via The Wall Street Journal

Georgia in 2023: • Received over 37,000 farmworkers from Latin America • Employed just 3 inspectors to make sure worker housing was up to code Our Atlanta Journal-Constitution story on the deplorable living conditions of the people who grow our food (w/Caitlin Thompson)⬇️ ajc.com/news/georgia-n…

Labor advocates say poultry plants prefer to hire undocumented immigrants because they can be more easily squeezed from the workers' comp system if and when they get hurt.  "They do whatever they want with us," an injured worker told me. ajc.com/news/georgia-n…

“Strength doesn’t come from here,” he noted, pointing to his flexed bicep, “but from here” – his head. “My dad kept telling me we could do it." ajc.com/news/georgia-n…

This is an excellent story that I strongly encourage anyone interested in studying the difficulty of going after migrant smugglers should read. It also demonstrates the ways in which democratic backsliding and corruption makes international law enforcement efforts much harder.

I met a Ga. voter who is "completely stuck." She's a diehard Republican but she's terrified of Trump's mass deportations pledge (her husband is undocumented). “Do I sacrifice my husband in order to stay afloat in a decent economy? Why can’t I have both?” ajc.com/news/georgia-n…

A seismic shift in US immigration policy is expected once President-elect Trump takes office. He, his team have vowed to conduct the largest mass deportation in US history; end birthright citizenship; militarize the border; enact ideological screenings for legal immigrants; 1/

I’m speaking with migrants outside Atlanta’s ICE field office about last night’s election results. “We’re fucked,” said the very first person I talked to, a woman from Nicaragua.

Update: Several of the migrants I’ve been speaking with say they would have voted for Trump themselves. Most are folks who crossed the border illegally in the last 2-3 years. They don’t believe Trump will deport them, because they are here to work and are “not criminals.”

“Democrats talk about Trump saying he is going to deport everyone, but that doesn’t really scare us. Everybody knows that’s a lie, that he’s not going to do it. We know Trump just says those things to get the gringos’ votes." ajc.com/news/georgia-n…

GA is the first state to release full vote history for 2024. As a share of the citizen voting-age population, turnout rates went up for all groups compared to 2020 🚨except Black Georgians🚨 #gapol Greg Bluestein Patricia Murphy Cliff Albright (🧵cliffalbright🧵) Chris Towler Mark Niesse Natalie Mendenhall

Out-of-sight and struggling: Georgia farmworkers still reeling from Helene from Lautaro Grinspan ajc.com/news/georgia-n…