Happy Semiquincentennial, America!

Things are going great

I wanted to send y’all some updates on what I’ve been working on. In America250 news: the cover of the March/April issue of Mother Jones featured a story I wrote with Dan Friedman. You can (probably) still grab a copy from Barnes and Noble, and you can read the story online here.

It seems like every single day there is another 250 news story, from passports with Donald Trump’s face on them to Trump’s big arch. Right now, I’m very interested in his decision to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. You can see the progress as of Monday the 27th here — it kind of looks to me like they are messing with peeling paint at the 13 second mark.

In February, I attended a master calendar hearing for the expedited Somali asylum cases, referred to as the Somali rocket docket, in Chicago. The individual hearings are running now, and I’m making an effort to attend as many possible.

In March, I went to Houston to watch the deployment of ICE into the airports.

A few weeks ago, the PBS Frontline documentary about Border Patrol’s surges aired. They used ten seconds of my footage, taken on January 12 in Minneapolis, after ICE hit someone’s vehicle. It inspired me to put together everything I filmed at the scene of the accident.

Bellingcat and CalMatters verified the identity of some of the Border Patrol agents who were deployed. In my video from 1/12, you can see Michael Sveum (EZ-2) catch a snowball lobbed at him and pepper spray a woman, and Edgar Vazquez (EZ-17) get questioned about why he has nicer gear than another agent.

In addition to the Somali cases and some more newsy ICE pieces, I have a handful of stories about the Border Patrol surge coming out in the near future. Some are in the editing process, others are still being written.

Last week, Mother Jones won a Webby for their on the ground coverage in Minneapolis. I was part of the team whose work was submitted, so I guess I’m now an award winning journalist! This is the playlist submitted for the Webby, and I’ve also made a playlist that covers all of my video work with Mother Jones.

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