The first Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting was awarded this year to the staff of This American Life with Molly O'Toole of the Los Angeles Times and Emily Green, freelancer, Vice News. The team was recognized for "'The Out Crowd,' revelatory, intimate journalism that illuminates the personal impact of the Trump Administration’s 'Remain in Mexico' policy."
Each contributor brought their own approach to the collaborative project. Read about This American Life's Nadia Reiman's process here, and Emily Green's here. In this installment, learn about how Molly O'Toole considered the story.
PULITZER PRIZES: What first inspired you to take on this story?
MOLLY O'TOOLE: Honestly, it’s a little hard to track the inspiration back. After the election in 2016, I did some reporting in southern Mexico, near the border with Guatemala, and you could already very much see that refugees and asylum seekers, people from around the world, even beyond Central America, were taking Donald Trump’s words from the campaign to heart, essentially trying to make it to the border before it closed, before their whole idea of America changed. But to deny asylum seekers their right under U.S. law to seek protection would be illegal — it was clear even then that to keep his political pledges, President Trump and his officials would have to break the law. The question was whether they would go that far. And they have.
So, I had been watching closely from even before Trump took office for signs of how his administration would respond to the most vulnerable asylum seekers and those seeking to enter the United States legally, as a kind of barometer for their willingness to skirt the law for political ends on any number of issues. In one of Trump’s first executive orders, tucked into a kind of wish list, was the administration’s intention – forget whether or not it was legal, or Mexico’s say in it — to push even non-Mexicans back to Mexico. They backed away quickly, but within months, asylum seekers and others were being kept from presenting themselves at official ports of entry, piling up on “waitlists” all across the border. And pretty soon — despite having no real clue how it would work in practice, these being some of the most dangerous cities in the world according to the U.S. State Department, Mexico claiming to not agree and trying to push back — Kirstjen Nielsen, the last actually Senate confirmed Homeland Security secretary, had announced “Remain in Mexico.”
Almost immediately, from its chaotic rollout, officials and advocates alike reached out to express concern about the very real life-or-death consequences of this policy. I saw it for myself all along the border. And over time, I built up trust and more and more sources within USCIS, many of whom felt this way: That the policy was not just legally wrong, but morally wrong. Talking to those pushed back to Mexico, and those pushing them back, was a powerful way to capture the true impact of the policy, but it really emerged organically from the basic reporting: What the hell is going on here.
PP: The conversations you had with the asylum officers add nuance to the immorality of this policy — was there anything about these testimonials that surprised you?
MO: There were many things that surprised me about the testimonials of the asylum officers — clearly, those choosing to speak out are a sort of self-selecting group, who felt strongly enough about this policy to take that risk. But it was sort of astonishing how widespread the discomfort was with this policy within the agency, even if individual officers experienced that discomfort in highly individualized ways.
One thing people should really know about the federal asylum corps: They are highly trained, and many of them are lawyers. They have incredibly intimate knowledge of on-the-ground situations in numerous countries across the globe, the intricacies of U.S. immigration law, the bureaucracy of the U.S. government and others, foreign policy, geopolitics, multiple languages … some of the most versatile public servants I’ve ever met. People trying to game the system – and they do exist, though they’re rare – really piss them off because of how seriously they take their jobs and how deserving a great many people are.
A surprising number of asylum officers were once refugees or asylum seekers themselves, and are now naturalized citizens – some worked in the same office where they took the oath.
Many people responded to the This American Life and Los Angeles Times story with polar opposite reactions: They were either angry that these asylum officers stayed working under the administration while also sort of actively resisting its policies, seeing it as a sort of a betrayal, or angry that they stayed working under the administration and kept implementing these policies they thought were illegal or immoral, seeing it as a kind of hypocrisy. So seeing the asylum officers, or rather hearing them, wrestle actively with that prompted such a strong but opposite feeling in people that I was a bit surprised — I think a lot of listeners and readers found themselves asking: What would I do in that situation? Which I think is what we want them to do — to empathize. To feel it personally.
PP: Ira Glass mentioned in an interview with Haaretz that it took a year to cultivate these sources. What were some of the challenges you faced in this process?
MO: It did take me a long time to cultivate sources in the Homeland Security department in general, and in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in particular — at least the kind of sources beyond the “gatekeepers” and Public Affairs shop and titles doing cable news hits, to the real human beings charged with implementing these policies. Those are the people I wanted to get to. They could tell me the most.
Obviously, under this administration in particular, there is a lot of risk to speaking to the media, to whistleblowing. The Obama administration, as well, was bad about transparency and went after leakers. but the level of media-bashing and active hunts to chase down “leakers” who generally are people who just talk to the media but whom the Trump administration sees as disloyal or politically inconvenient has been on a whole other level. You also have officials who lie baldly, blatantly, not caring particularly if they get caught in it, and others actively trying to obstruct or at least get around the law.
Sourcing in the Trump administration is fraught, particularly within DHS, but in addition to that — the federal asylum officers, while having an incredibly difficult job and extensive training and an incredible power over people’s lives, are not exactly attention and headline grabbers. These are the people who, under different administrations, were largely happy to focus on the work, and quite a lot of it. They came forward to me, and to others, and keep coming forward, because that’s how troubled they were by the “Remain in Mexico” policy in particular, and how troubled they still are by what is going on with immigration today.
One asylum officer sort of led to another asylum officer who led to another asylum officer and so on. But it did take quite a while to earn their trust and to convince them I was going to be covering these issues for the long haul, and as deeply as I could. After all, whether you agree with them or not, it is their livelihood, their careers, their ability to care for family, that’s on the line for them. And clearly, lives are very much on the line on the other side of the asylum interview. The very least we can do as reporters is keep our word and treat people with dignity.
Going across the country to empower people tell a story in their own words while also keeping them anonymous and protecting their identity — now that was a challenge in an audio format. But I think we found the right balance that stayed true to their feeling while also maintaining that trust.
During the reporting process, and after the This American Life episode and Times story came out, officials admonished DHS employees not to talk to reporters and hunted for my sources. And Ken Cuccinelli, the one-time head of USCIS (though a court found his appointment to that position illegal) decided to Tweet at me out of the blue late on a recent Friday night, so clearly, he, for one, hasn’t forgotten.
PP: What aspects of audio reporting do you think made this medium such an effective fit for this story?
MO: Audio was really the only medium for this story. I work in words, and I love them dearly, but they can really only go so far toward capturing what it is like to be in a de-facto refugee camp on the U.S.-Mexico border, the sort of beautiful heartbreaking chaos of it, between traffic and children’s laughter and cooking food and yelling; the visceral, undeniable fear of being kidnapped and then hearing, for yourself, the threats of that almost inevitable kidnapper, which Emily Green so powerfully reported; the overwhelming emotions that the asylum officers are wrestling with as confront themselves and their humanity.
I have tried many times to capture these scenes and emotions in words, as faithfully and powerfully as I can, but there is something seismic about literally letting the people whose story it, in fact, is, tell it in their own words. For others to hear it straight from them. You can put a listener so immediately there, and not let them go, until it’s done. I’m so proud of how we facilitated that, how we put it together, but really, that’s where the power is. Their words; not mine.
Thank God for Nadia Reiman, my producer at This American Life and all of those amazing audio reporting geniuses for seeing — hearing rather —what this story could be, what it in fact already was. It could only be a radio story. It always was a radio story, even before I knew better.
PP: What impact do you hope your reporting has on immigration discourse in America?
MO: Immigration discourse in America is not exactly discourse. It’s not so much an interchange of ideas as a shouting match or Twitter trolling. (I delightfully learned what “getting ratioed” is covering immigration under the Trump administration.) Immigration is widely viewed as a domestic political debate, a particularly American conceit. Luckily, I’ve had the opportunity to cover immigration from outside the United States, which has made me a much better reporter, because it’s so much more than politics. On the one hand, it’s not so much about us as Americans as we make it out to be; on the other, almost every aspect of global migration can be tied back to a broad swath of U.S. policy in one way or another. The United States still very much is a symbol for the world; it just means dramatically different things to different people, and in many cases, not what it used to mean.
In the end, I hope that my reporting restores some of the dignity and humanity that’s missing — ideas that didn’t used to be controversial or political in America, or at least, most people had to make a show of believing in them, and that made us all a bit better.
PP: How did you find out you won the first Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting, and what did this mean to you?
MO: I won’t go into too much detail here, because I believe there’s something about the Pulitzer Prizes on the day of the Pulitzer Prizes being announced being just about the worst kept secret in journalism, and I don’t want to reveal my sources. But I will say it was a complete and utter surprise when I found out — there was a very ominous Zoom invitation with several top editors and just the subject line “Molly.”
I’d spent a fair amount of time sparring with officials in the days prior over a series of stories on the administration trying to quickly deport children under the cover of the coronavirus, so I naturally assumed if I was not getting fired, I was at least getting in a fair amount of trouble. I still gasped out loud and covered my face and mostly floundered for words for much of the Zoom call with the editors and it took all my little self-control to hold it in until I closed the screen and could react properly: Collapsing in a fit of laughter and tears before my (very confused) partner.
What it meant to me — This job is hard. We don’t talk about it enough, how hard it is. It should be hard, in a way, because it means we care, and the very best journalists are the ones who care, so deeply it hurts sometimes. And it does. Don’t get me wrong — it is an immense privilege to do this job every day, and much of the time I feel like I somehow cheated The System because I love what I do. But it’s hard. That’s why I think it almost came as relief as much as sheer unadulterated foolish joy. What this means, to me, and what I hope it means to others: Keep caring. Keep fighting. Because if it touches one person, it matters. It’s worth it. Really.