Immigration policy remains one of the most contentious, consequential and misunderstood issues in the United States. For journalists, it’s more important than ever to inform immigration stories with reliable data, and to highlight the impact of national policies on local communities.
Late last month, The Journalist’s Resource hosted an hourlong webinar on how to improve immigration news coverage with conscientious, data-driven reporting and original story ideas. Panelists included:
- Linda Dakin-Grimm, an attorney who has represented more than 100 unaccompanied migrant children and separated families in the U.S. immigration system; she successfully challenged the first Trump Administration in federal courts.
- Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at Syracuse University whose research focuses on immigration and border enforcement across the U.S.
- Caitlin Dickerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and feature writer for The Atlantic who specializes in immigration coverage.
We’re posting a video recording below — along with a few tips from the panelists and a linked list of the data resources they highlighted.
The event, which I moderated, was on the record. Journalists are encouraged to include insights from the video in their immigration coverage, and educators are encouraged to share the video with students.
I hope you take the time to watch the video, because the panelists shared a ton of great reporting tips. Here are three of them:
1. Beware of superlative words like “unprecedented” and “most ever.”
Dickerson advised against the superlative language she has noticed in many recent headlines: “Most migrant encounters at the border EVER,” for example, or “Authorities encountering record number at the border each day amid unprecedented surge.”
“The message that I get from all these examples is that the country is in an unprecedented emergency that we’ve never come up against before, and that could only lead to disaster,” Dickerson said. “What I try to encourage people to do is to zoom out and take a longer view.”
Showing a historical graph of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, spanning from 1960 to 2021, she pointed out spikes in the early 1980s and the early 2000s similar in size to the 2021 spike.
“Large numbers of immigration are not new,” Dickerson said. “They’re something that we’ve encountered before … So when you’re writing, I want to encourage you not to just look at the last two or five years of data. Look at the last 30 or 50 years of data.”
2. Learn how to interrogate and validate ICE data.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests have been the focus of many news stories across the country. Kocher noted that ICE is mandated by Congress to publish new detention data reports twice a month. While the recency of the data is helpful, it’s important to make sure the data is accurate before citing it in news stories.
“If you are using government data, especially government data that’s produced fairly quickly, it’s really important that you understand how to validate data, which means how to ensure that the data is accurate and reliable,” Kocher said. “ICE’s detention data has errors in it almost every single time they post it.”
For a brief primer on how to vet and validate ICE data, see Kocher’s Substack post “Immigration Data Literacy Skills to Help You Survive a New Wave of ICE Confusion.”
The post walks readers through a recent problem in an ICE spreadsheet that stemmed from the agency erroneously transposing two fields of data, which the agency subsequently corrected. It also offers tips for fact-checking government press release headlines.
3. Make clear how difficult it is to migrate to the U.S. permanently.
“The first thing for everyone, including your readers, to know is that under our current law — and our current law has been the way it is for quite some time — is that it is exceptionally difficult for anyone to migrate to live and work long-term in the U.S. as a permanent resident,” Dakin-Grimm said.
There are only four paths to legal migration, she explained:
- Family-based migration lets U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to sponsor family members to become lawful permanent residents. In general, family-sponsored preference visas are limited to 226,000 per year. (This limit does not include immediate relatives of U.S. citizens—spouses, unmarried children under 21, and parents—who are not subject to numerical restrictions.)
- Employment-based migration, through which foreign nationals can obtain permanent residency — green cards — through employment or through a large investment in a commercial business. The federal government generally allocates 140,000 employment-based immigration visas annually.
- The Diversity Immigration Visa Program, also called the diversity lottery,grants visas to people from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the U.S. For fiscal year 2026, up to 55,000 diversity visas will be available, according to the U.S. Department of State.
- Humanitarian immigration relief programs, administered via several U.S. agencies. These include the refugee program, which allows individuals to apply for resettlement before entering the U.S. if they can demonstrate persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group; the asylum program, in which people fleeing persecution apply for immigration status from within the U.S. or at a port of entry; T visas, issued to human trafficking victims; U visas, issued to victims of crimes including domestic violence and kidnapping; and Special Immigrant Juvenile status, which allows certain children to apply for lawful permanent status if they have been subject to abuse, abandonment or neglect.
Dakin-Grimm noted that many people who arrive at the southern border ask for asylum without realizing what is required to qualify for asylum. Most of them will not qualify.
“To qualify, a person has to prove that they fear persecution or were already severely persecuted in their home country — and that the persecution was because of their race, religion, national origin, political opinion or social group,” she said. “Persecution for any other reason doesn’t qualify. And reasons other than persecution — like war, famine, etc. — do not qualify.”
Immigration data resources
Federal government sources:
Take note: Links to government web pages sometimes change, move or disappear. When working with data from a .gov website, we recommend you download what you need to your local server or computer, if possible. Read our tipsheet on organizing your research.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: The USCIS data hub provides federal government data on various operations, including refugee processing data, naturalization rates and information about individual U.S. employers’ hiring of foreign nationals.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: ICE issues detention reports roughly every two weeks.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Public Data Portal: CBP publishes datasets and dashboards on topics such as migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border, trade enforcement actions and air travel passenger entry statistics.
Executive Office for Immigration Review: EOIR is the division of the U.S. Department of Justice that adjudicates immigration cases including asylum claims and deportation proceedings. The Statistics and Reports page includes some data on caseload statistics, court backlog information and pending unaccompanied minor cases.
Non-government sources:
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse: The TRAC team uses Freedom of Information Act requests to gather immigration enforcement and court data from the federal government, then analyzes and presents the data online via interactive tools and written reports. Formerly a project based at Syracuse University, TRAC now has a new home at tracreports.org. Much of the information that can’t be found on federal government websites can be found here, presented in an accessible way. Local reporters take note: TRAC includes a helpful report comparing differences in immigration judges’ asylum denial rates in courts across the U.S.
Austin Kocher’s Substack: Kocher, who spent many years as a TRAC researcher, now offers a website and newsletter that help readers navigate the complexities of the U.S. immigration system. Check it out for insights on vetting the accuracy of ICE data, a survey of “know your rights” resources immigrants and their families, and more.
Adam Isacson’s searchable migration data tool: Every month, CBP updates and publishes a dataset of its encounters with migrants since fiscal year 2020 — and offers the data in tables with tens of thousands of rows. Isacson, director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, created this tool to make that data much easier to search.
Immigration Policy Tracking Project: Led by Professor Lucas Guttentag, who teaches at both Stanford and Yale Law Schools, IPTP catalogs every known immigration policy from both the first and the current Trump administrations. The interactive tool is filterable by subject matter, agency and administrative action and searchable by keyword.
Pew Research Center’s Immigration and Migration page: Pew, a nonpartisan think tank, publishes periodic reports on a wide range of survey and demographic data. Recent topics include Americans’ opinions on undocumented immigrants, insights on the H-1B visa program and views on Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship.
Migration Policy Institute’s Migration Data Hub: MPI, another nonpartisan think tank, offers resources including state-level immigration data and state-level DACA data, as well as international migration statistics.
7 ways to improve news coverage of immigration at the southern U.S. border: This 2023 tip sheet from The Journalist’s Resource, authored by Clark Merrefield, includes more great reporting tips and links to relevant academic research.
A primer for journalists covering immigrant workers in the U.S., also authored by Merrefield, includes key facts and data about the nation’s immigrant workforce.
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