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This week, let's take a closer look at stories of the hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants who were arrested in the U.S. by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and sent to a prison in El Salvador, after the Trump administration invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport them. As multiple reporters and publications attempted to piece together what happened, we can see how different POVs add layers of context and show how one event ripples through many communities:
On the ground: Families search for their loved ones
Mother Jones reporters Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias told the story of a wife who discovered that her husband had been sent to El Salvador after she zoomed in on a photo and recognized his tattoos. At the Washington Post, Silvia Foster-Frau profiled Mervin Yamarte, who was living in Dallas with friends from Venezuela before he was arrested; his mother later discovered video of him being pulled off a plane in El Salvador. And at The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer recounted how a woman in Venezuela kept in contact with her makeup artist son after he was first detained in the U.S. — only to find out that he, too, was subsequently sent to El Salvador:
Throughout the fall and winter, Alexis Romero de Hernández struggled to accept a grim new routine. She lived in a small town in central Venezuela called Capacho, with her husband and the younger of her two sons. Her eldest, a thirty-one-year-old makeup artist named Andry José Hernández Romero, was being held in an immigration jail in San Diego. He called her every few days, usually late in the afternoon, to reassure her that he was safe. The calls would last about a minute. Alexis had to put money on his calling card to keep them coming. “Mama, relax,” Andry would tell her. “I’m fine. They’re treating us well. What’s bad is that we’re stuck here.”
In the air: Flight attendants speak out
Meanwhile, at ProPublica, reporter McKenzie Funk shared the backstory on how flight attendants who got jobs with Global Crossing Airlines were shocked to learn that the private company would be running deportation flights for ICE. The company also participated in the flights taking Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador.
The flight attendants were most concerned about their inability to treat their passengers humanely — and to keep them safe. (In 2021, an ICE spokesperson told the publication Capital & Main that the agency “follows best practices when it comes to the security, safety and welfare of the individuals returned to their countries of origin.”)
They worried about what would happen in an emergency. Could they really get over a hundred chained passengers off the plane in time?
“They never taught us anything regarding the immigration flights,” one said. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”
As Funk noted on Bluesky: "Most of the flight attendants hadn't knowingly signed up to help deport people. They knew a lot about a topic of great national interest, but they weren’t talking politics — just about what they experienced. There's something trustworthy, to me, about third-party witnesses like this."
Hat tip to Storyboard editor emerita Jacqui Banaszynski for alerting me to Funk’s piece. I asked Jacqui what she appreciated about this story. “It adheres to a counterintuitive wisdom of story work: The more dramatic the information, the more matter-of-fact the tone,” she told me.
The news business tends to focus on scoops, but kaleidoscopic coverage like this of the same issue, across many publications, underscores the gravity of the moment and deepens readers' understanding. Each story matters.
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Links of note
- How to leak to a journalist: From our sister publication Nieman Lab, Laura Hazard Owen shares a comprehensive guide on how to safely and securely communicate with journalists. And Neel Dhanesha reports on a novel method that ProPublica recently employed to develop sources: parking a truck outside USAID headquarters in Washington with an LED billboard encouraging laid-off workers to contact its tip line.
- "I’m a big believer that writers should live their lives in the form of a question." A must-read from Storyboard contributor Mallary Tenore Tarpley's newsletter, all about building our interviewing skills. It includes timeless advice she's gleaned over the years, including tips from writing coaches like Roy Peter Clark ("get the name of the dog").
- Journalist and Storyboard contributor Kim Cross is teaching a Reconstructed Narrative feature-writing workshop May 28-June 1 in Texas, with fellow writers Glenn Stout and Hampton Sides. As Cross tells us: "It's in Archer City, Larry McMurtry's one-stoplight hometown, which has a tradition of a literary nonfiction workshop hosted by George Getschow, founder of the Mayborn Conference." Registration will be open to 12 attendees.
- Winners and finalists have been announced for the 2025 J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards, which honor the best in American nonfiction book-writing. Those honored include Susie Cagle and Dan Xin Huang for their works-in-progress, Rebecca Nagle for By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, and Kathleen DuVal for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.
- "I didn’t know it at the time, but those early rejections were a gift. If 'Good Bones' had been published in one of those print journals, it wouldn’t have gone viral." At Memoir Land, an excerpt from poet Maggie Smith's new book, Dear Writer, and an important lesson about embracing rejection as we put our work out into the world.
Keep sharing your stories,
Mark Armstrong
Editor
Nieman Storyboard
On Bluesky: @niemanstoryboard.org
Send me your story, book, podcast, and documentary recommendations: editor@niemanstoryboard.org
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