When your local reporter needs the same protection as a war correspondent

 Via Poynter

Five months of covering ICE raids taught our small LA newsroom hard lessons — and we're still figuring out how to sustain it

By: Michelle Zenarosa
November 6, 2025

When federal immigration operations began sweeping across Los Angeles in June, our newsroom worked around the clock. I didn’t have to tell them to. No one wanted to stop.

One reporter’s family members were being followed. Another staffer’s family went into hiding — despite having legal status. Sources we’d cultivated for years suddenly wouldn’t answer calls. At LA Public Press, a 14-person nonprofit newsroom led by and largely staffed by people of color who grew up in the neighborhoods we cover, everyone on staff was personally touched by the raids in some way. We weren’t covering some abstract story happening to other people. We were covering home.

By July, I had to force people to take weekends off. Soon after, every other Friday became mandatory time away. The story hasn’t stopped, but boundaries are harder to draw when you’re covering what’s happening to your own family.

It took us weeks to realize we were facing the same dangers as foreign correspondents in conflict zones — the threat of violence, retaliation and the exhaustion of sustained trauma coverage. But we didn’t have their security teams, legal protections or institutional support. --click for full article

How two photojournalists are dealing with the trauma of documenting immigrant detentions at Federal Plaza

 Via AM New York

October 28, 2025

ICE in courts: How two photojournalists are dealing with the trauma of documenting immigrant detentions at Federal Plaza

Almost every day for five months, photojournalists David Dee Delgado and Carol Guzy have entered 26 Federal Plaza with cameras in hand, ready to capture what many are calling one of the most startling stories of this century: ICE detainments inside the immigration court.

Guzy, 69, and Delgado, 49, have walked the hallways of 26 Federal Plaza, working alongside amNewYork and other outlets to document masked federal agents arresting immigrants who attended legally mandated court hearings. With Delgado on assignment for Reuters, a photo agency, and Guzy performing a long-term photo project, both shutterbugs knew that the proliferation and escalation of President Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown was going to be a vital story to tell. - click for full article

"Guzy, a multi-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has covered war zones, the toll of gun violence, and much more, yet says covering ICE arrests has affected her unlike anything else in her long career."

"I know down the line, I’m pretty sure this is gonna come out in some type of f**ked up way. I’m probably gonna need therapy, but, yeah, but at this moment, you know, I just go through the motions,” Delgado said."

Independent photojournalist Nate Gowdy was assaulted and detained by police while documenting a protest against immigration raids in downtown Los Angeles, California, on August 8, 2025.

 Via Press Freedom Tracker

August 13, 2025

Independent photojournalist Nate Gowdy was assaulted and detained by police while documenting a protest against immigration raids in downtown Los Angeles, California, on August 8, 2025.

Protests in LA began in early June in response to federal raids of workplaces and areas in and around the city where immigrant day laborers gather, amid the Trump administration’s larger immigration crackdown. Raids at Home Depots in early August took place seemingly in defiance of a July 11 court order temporarily prohibiting federal agents from using discriminatory profiling.

On Aug. 8, two days after an immigration raid in the parking lot of a Home Depot in LA’s Westlake neighborhood, protesters gathered at the store and marched to the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown. The demonstrators and the journalists covering them encountered a violent response from Los Angeles Police Department officers, violating a court order protecting the press from arrest, assault or other interference.

Gowdy, who was visiting from Seattle, Washington, said he had been photographing the Aug. 8 protest with his partner, fellow journalist Carrie Schreck. The two began documenting the demonstration as protesters started to march. The protest remained peaceful, Gowdy said, until the LAPD arrived.

“They basically lined up and without any provocation, in order to move people, started just swinging their batons indiscriminately,” he told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.

Gowdy watched as one journalist, Nick Stern, waving his press badge to officers, was struck in the face with a police baton. Gowdy himself was thrown to the ground by several officers, scraping his elbow and damaging the metal connectors on the strap holding his spare camera lenses.

“They were so aggressive and wild-eyed and violent,” he said of the LAPD.

After police declared the protest an unlawful assembly, officers pushed demonstrators farther from the detention center. Gowdy and Schreck had stopped photographing and were leaving the area when they were suddenly kettled, or herded by police, along with a handful of journalists and demonstrators, just three blocks from Schreck’s apartment.

Some had press credentials, but Gowdy said officers ignored them.

“They said they didn’t care, and that everyone should have to line up against the wall,” Gowdy recalled.

The journalists’ hands were placed in zip-tie restraints. While some were released, Gowdy and Schreck remained detained for not having physical press badges. Despite carrying camera gear and being vouched for by their colleagues, the officers questioned their legitimacy and denied their requests to speak with a public information officer.

Gowdy offered to show digital credentials and suggested a quick online search to verify his work with major news outlets, but was told he’d be cited for failure to disperse. He and Schreck were taken to a nearby police station and eventually released after more than two hours in custody.

Gowdy said such traumatic encounters can discourage journalists from covering protests.

“In this case, the law was on our side,” he said. “But they didn’t seem to know the law, or they willfully disregarded it in order to intimidate and harass us.”

Gowdy said he doesn’t wear a press badge when he covers protests in Seattle, after it made him a police target. Covering the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, he saw how press credentials can also attract threats from demonstrators. Still, he said this incident convinced him to carry one just in case.

The LAPD did not respond to a Tracker request for comment about the detained journalists. In a statement posted to the social platform X, the department’s Central Division wrote that an unlawful assembly was declared “due to the aggressive nature of a few demonstrators.”

“The protest went into the late night hours with people refusing to disperse,” it continued. “Central Division will continue to support 1st Amendment rights of all people. However, if violence or criminal activity occurs, laws will be enforced.”


The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker catalogues press freedom violations in the United States. Email tips to tips@pressfreedomtracker.us.

STEPHEN WILKES: ELLIS ISLAND, GHOSTS OF OUR ANCESTORS

Isolation ward, Statue of Liberty, Island 3, Ellis Island

On the 20th anniversary of Stephen Wilkes documentary project photographing the abandoned buildings on the southern side of Ellis Island, and with the future of immigration and refuge in America in contention, Wilkes takes us on an unforgettable journey through our collective past that reminds us how we became the diverse nation that we are today and asks us to reflect on our own humanity.

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to present “Ellis Island: Ghosts of Our Ancestors”, a timely exhibition which opens with a public reception for the photographer on Friday, October 5, from 5 – 7 PM. The exhibition continues through November 18.

Twelve million people passed through Ellis Island from 1892 until its closing in 1954, and tens of millions of Americans today are descendants of immigrants who were thought deplorable by those already here. Wilkes's powerful images of the underbelly of the island—a purgatory between freedom and captivity—ask us to reflect on the defining experiences of millions. Photographed over five years beginning in 1998, the photographs are a visual history of the immigration center and adjoining hospital which grew to 22 medical buildings spread across three islands. In the era before antibiotics, tens of thousands of immigrant patients were healed from illness before becoming citizens. Neglected for almost fifty years, the buildings were in a state of extreme disrepair: lead paint peeled from the ceilings and walls, vines and trees grew through the floorboards, detritus and debris littered the hallways. In rooms long-abandoned, Wilkes captured a spirited new vision of this gateway to freedom.


“I photographed every corner, every crevice, in every light. Strange things happened. I’d photograph a mirror attached to a wall for half a century, only to return and find the mirror shattered. I’d photograph a shoe, only to come back and find it disappeared. I photographed the 500-foot long spine of the hospital, Corridor #9, a long tunnel of decay. In the photograph of it, you’ll see a golden glow of sunshine warming the walls at the far end. In all the times I went back, I’ve never seen this glow again, nor can I figure out its origin.

What I was obsessed to do, almost as if I was chosen to do it, was document the light and the energy and living spirit of this place. I added no light of my own, nor any artifice of the photographic craft. I wasn’t simply interested in graphics born from the patina of ruin. I just wanted to record the place as I found it.”


– Stephen Wilkes