Desperate Times...
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John Smith
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In June 2018, someone came to Jennifer Harbury, an attorney and civil rights activist based in the border town of Weslaco, Texas, seeking legal advice about how to release a tape recording they had made of the children crying in the detention center. Harbury has never publicly disclosed the identity of that whistleblower for a variety of reasons, including attorney-client privilege, but she claims it is someone she has known for years who has “extremely high credibility.” Harbury took the individual on as a client and promised to act as a go-between with journalists to ensure the tape could be made public responsibly.
And Harbury had one particular journalist in mind. “I’ve always really respected her courage,” Harbury says of Thompson, whose reporting in Central America she had long admired, even if she didn’t know Thompson personally. “She’s always been a top-notch writer who carefully checks out her stories and has tons of credibility. And she is fearless.”
A love of storytelling and a desire to travel led her into journalism. Before joining ProPublica, Thompson, who has degrees from Purdue University and George Washington University, spent 15 years at The New York Times as the Mexico City bureau chief and as an investigative reporter. Among other things, her stories have uncovered U.S. support for a Honduran military unit that kidnapped and murdered hundreds of suspected political opponents, and Washington’s role in Mexico’s fight against drug traffickers. She doesn’t seek out danger, but it has found her, and on more than one occasion she has had to talk her way out of captivity from armed criminal gangs. And it was Thompson’s daring and meticulous work in Central America that brought her to the attention of someone else.
Thompson and others from the “Zero Tolerance” reporting team who were finalists for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service.
It makes for a heart-wrenching listen. But the seasoned Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist in Thompson immediately took over. And minutes after ProPublica published the tape and her story on June 18, 2018, the recording was played in the middle of a White House press briefing. Less than 48 hours later, it was being played on the floor of Congress, and President Donald Trump, facing a public outcry over the border detention centers, signed an executive order meant to end child separation policies. But that tape and the aftermath were just the beginning of a story that finds Thompson perched on the front lines of history.
by Sean Braswell
At first, Ginger Thompson could hardly believe what she was hearing on the audiotape. What she could make out were several young children from Central America sobbing and crying out for “Mami” and “Papá.” One girl begs for somebody to phone her aunt. Then comes a grown-up male voice, a Border Patrol agent responding to the chaotic scene. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he quips. “What’s missing is a conductor.”
MEET THE REPORTER
WHO MADE
AMERICA LISTEN
TO THE CHILDREN
AT THE BORDER
BY SEAN BRASWELL
"Absolutely Gut-Wrenching & Beyond Disturbing"
SOURCE • DEMETRIUS FREEDMAN
It was no accident that the impactful audio found its way to Thompson, 55, a senior reporter for ProPublica. She has spent her career following developments along the U.S.-Mexico border. Her whole life, really. An Army brat, she grew up in El Paso, Texas, the border city where her father was stationed. She learned Spanish at an early age and spent many weekends across the border in Ciudad Juárez with her friends and their families. “Living on the border,” says Thompson, “being a part of that school, and being a part of this very mixed community — military families, immigrant families, longtime Texan families — it was just a really interesting place to grow up.”
Thompson fell in love with writing and telling other people’s stories, not as a journalist but as editor of her (award-winning) high school yearbook. “We really focused,” says Thompson, who ranked second in her class. “It was more like a local reporting organization.”
A BORDER-TOWN ARMY BRAT
Only desperate times could inspire such desperate measures. In El Salvador, Cindy Madrid, a mother in her 20s, was walking with her boyfriend when he was shot and killed by a well-known gang member. The murderer warned her she would be next if she said anything. She kept quiet, but his harassment continued. She felt there was no escape, for her or for her young daughter, Jimena, who, on another occasion was nearly ripped from her arms in a kidnapping attempt. And so she fled for the impossible dream pursued by so many others throughout history — to America.
After Thompson received the damning audiotape from Harbury, she immediately went into reporter mode. She knew that before the tape could be made public, it was critical to ensure that it was real and presented in the proper way. Thompson quickly set about verifying that the audio was authentic, including confirming the identity of the girl (by dialing the number the girl offers on the recording) as well as the identity of the source, that the source had access to the Border Patrol facility, and that the recording was unedited and representative of what was transpiring at the facility. Thompson, who describes herself as a perfectionist, recalls: "What was important was for me to analyze it, get the material I needed, and to get that tape up so that it might matter and mean something.”
She learned that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old, and they had only just been separated from their parents. Their emotions are raw. Those working at the facility are doing their best to comfort the children and provide them with food and toys. According to Thompson’s reporting, even the officer making a joke about the “orchestra” is doing so in a vain attempt to lighten the mood. But he can’t. The kids are inconsolable.
Thompson worked most of the weekend on the story. She barely changed out of her pajamas. Shortly after her story was published, she recalls taking a shower when she heard the tape being played on television. She had listened to the tape a dozen times in order to write about it. But she hadn’t let it sink in. “It was the first time I really heard the tape as Ginger the human being, and not Ginger the reporter,” she says, “and that’s when the sounds of those voices began to really affect me.”
THE STORY OF A LIFTIME
Thompson was not the only one stirred by the tape. “Heartbreaking,” New York Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat and Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner tweeted about the recording after the release of Thompson’s story. “Absolutely gut-wrenching & beyond disturbing,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat. Most Americans, including members of Congress, had known for weeks about the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which had separated more than 2,300 children from their parents since that April, and it had been condemned from all sides. The American Academy of Pediatrics argued the policy would cause the children “irreparable harm.” Former first lady Laura Bush called it “cruel” and “immoral.”
But it wasn’t until Thompson’s story and the release of the audio that the horrifying human consequences of the border drama grabbed America by the collar. The resulting public sentiment and political pressure forced the administration to announce that it would end its child separation policy and attempt to reunify those who had already been separated. “I was very heartened that people on both sides of the political divide were horrified when they heard the tape,” says Harbury, “and stood up immediately and said, ‘No way. That’s going too far.’”
Administration officials responded quickly to the tape’s release. “We will not apologize,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters regarding the child separation policy, claiming that the administration was only enforcing the law and it would be up to Congress to change it. One senior Homeland Security official told OZY on condition of anonymity that the detention centers were never meant to house so many immigrants. "They were meant to be wait-through stations," the official said, adding that Democratic lawmakers' refusal to approve additional funds for the department left them with few options once the number of daily migrant crossings rose. “We are doing the right thing. We are taking care of these children. They are not being abused,” former Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
But, for many who work on the ground at the border, Thompson’s story was huge. The story “woke a different level of discussion about what is happening,” says Alejandra Y. Castillo, the CEO of YWCA USA, which works on issues related to the migrant crisis and protecting women and children.
The release of the searing audio made plain the horrifying human consequences of the border drama.
SOURCE • HECTOR EMMANUAL
SOURCE • JANE HAHN
Thompson interviewing subjects in Mali for her piece “The Narco-Terror Trap.”
Continuing Separation Anxiety
In some cases, as Thompson’s subsequent reporting confirmed, the Trump administration’s attempts at reunification were successful. The 6-year-old girl on the tape who wanted to
phone her aunt, a Salvadoran immigrant named Jimena Valencia Madrid (see Jimena's story in the sidebar), was finally reunited with her mother, Cindy, at a Houston airport the next month.
But even where reunification occurs, separation can be a life-shattering event. According to Castillo, whose organization works with displaced families all the time, there is something even worse than children crying on tape: the children who don’t cry because the trauma is so deep. “My concern is that the infliction of the trauma will be lasting for many, many years, if not for a lifetime,” she says.
And, despite the public retreat from the policy, in the weeks and months since, border agents have continued to remove children from their parents as the administration remained committed to its goal of deterring asylum-seekers. According to Harbury, families are still being separated, and not reunited, despite the administration’s supposed pivot. Many times children are plucked from parents who are charged with mere misdemeanors. “It’s as if you get a parking ticket,” says Harbury, “and the police come by your house and take away your children.” Many in the Trump administration believe its tactics are working: Immigrants “in custody” fell from a stunning 20,000 in May to around 3,000 in December 2019, while daily apprehensions dropped from 4,600 to just 1,300 in that same period, acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan reported in January.
In recent days, activists have been trying to remind Americans of the outrage they felt in 2018 over the audiotape and the child separation policy. While performing “Born in the U.S.A.” during the Super Bowl half-time show, Jennifer Lopez was surrounded by children in cage-like enclosures. The following day, caucusgoers in Des Moines, Iowa, were confronted with dozens of chain-link cages holding fake children under signs reading “#Don’t Look Away.”
AN “ALL-HANDS-ON-DECK MOMENT”
Still, it has been hard to re-create the impact of hearing from the children themselves, the ones who, as Thompson told NPR after the tape had been released, have the most at stake. “Unless we hear from the children, we don’t have a real understanding of what it is, of what this policy is and what it’s doing.”
Thompson, who last year married her longtime partner, Tony Cavin, a deputy foreign editor at CBS News, continues to keep busy with her reporting. She doesn’t really have hobbies, she says, but loves reading a good book on the beach when she can get away. “I was on a train with a colleague who was going to take a guitar lesson recently. I was so jealous,” she jokes.
Although Thompson loves her work and takes it very seriously, she demurs when confronted with how courageous others consider her to be. She feels the courage lies elsewhere: “The person who shared this tape with Jennifer, who was willing to talk to me about how they obtained the tape, people who are whistleblowers at the risk of losing their jobs,” she says. “I’m inspired by their courage.”
Thompson plans to continue to report about hard places and vulnerable people and to speak truth to power, and she is constantly looking for new ways to tell stories, from documentaries to podcasts. “My plan is to keep finding big and important stories to tell,” she says. “In these times, with all that’s going on in the country and at the border, it feels almost like an all-hands-on-deck moment.”
Desperate Times...
A month after the tape's release and Trump's executive order ending child separation, Cindy was finally released in Los Fresnos. Even then, reunification was chaos. At first, U.S. officials told her she would have to have a background check and a DNA test before she could be reunited with Jimena — a process that could take 5 to 14 days. Then she was told she could leave immediately, but must fly to Phoenix at her own expense. Finally, clarity: Jimena would be flown to the Houston airport. Cindy drove six hours north with her lawyer, and, in an emotional 3 a.m. meeting, the mother and daughter were reunited.
Thompson’s journalism was also inspiring for many in the business, including students at Columbia University’s journalism school, where Thompson is an adjunct faculty member. “She is a role model for them, a journalist who nails the story and reflects all sides with intelligence and understanding,” says Sheila Coronel, an award-winning investigative journalist and dean of academic affairs at Columbia.
The response to the story was gratifying for Thompson, who describes herself as generally pretty shy and “not a cheerleader type.” She was forced out of her comfort zone in the wake of the news-shattering headlines and found herself on the other side of the story as the subject of television and radio interviews. "I don’t love being in front of cameras, but I love telling the stories of other people,” she says. “When it comes to putting forth issues that are important, or standing up for issues involving other people, I am not at all afraid.”
Special reporting by Nick Fouriezos
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE
Because some of the most impactful stories in journalism are the ones that let the subjects speak for themselves.
Thompson interviewing a family in El Salvador who had been separated under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.
SOURCE • GETTY
SOURCE • JANE HAHN
SOURCE • John Moore/Getty
SOURCE • John Moore/Getty
SOURCE • Marie D. De Jes's/Houston Chronicle via AP
Desperate Times...
Cindy and Jimena remain with family in Houston, nearly two years after their reunification. Their next court date is set for November, when a trial day will likely be set for 2021. Cindy has been learning English at church, while Jimena has rapidly picked up the language in school. Together, they hope to build a meaningful life in the United States. As Jimena told CNN last year: "I love my school. I love my church. I love to smile. I love and believe in the American dream."
SOURCE • John L. Mone via AP
JIMENA'S STORY: PART I
JIMENA'S STORY: PART II
JIMENA'S STORY: PART III
JIMENA'S STORY: The Next Chapter
The journey was treacherous for Cindy and Jimena. A drive that normally takes 30 hours ended up taking 17 days, criss-crossing through three countries in their trek to the U.S.-Mexican border town of Reynosa. She didn't want to employ a smuggler but felt like she had no other choice: With the coyote's help, they crossed the Rio Grande, a river that has claimed the lives of many border-crossers.
After all of that, they were picked up within minutes by Border Patrol near McAllen, Texas. Cindy was taken to court and told her daughter would be waiting for her. But instead, Jimena was flown to a children's facility in Phoenix, Arizona, while Cindy was shipped to Port Isabel Detention Center in East Texas. The next time Cindy would hear Jimena's voice would be on Thompson's tape.
Thompson plans to continue to report about hard places and vulnerable people and to speak truth to power, and she is constantly looking for new ways to tell stories, from documentaries to podcasts. “My plan is to keep finding big and important stories to tell,” she says. “In these times, with all that’s going on in the country and at the border, it feels almost like an all-hands-on-deck moment.”