Protecting immigrant journalists has to be an industry-wide priority

It is no secret that both immigrants and journalists are under attack. Immigrant journalists face the double threat of trying to stay safe while running headlong into unsafe situations in order to do their jobs, and increasingly, a press pass or vest does little to prevent direct attacks or even arrest. However dangerous the circumstances are for all immigrant journalists, nowhere is the threat higher than for immigrant or exiled journalists working in in-language and community-based news media — a message heard loud and clear with the arrest and deportation of immigrant community journalist Mario Guevara.

Whether they are working at legacy ethnic press, or reporting for the hundreds of digital news outlets serving hyperlocal immigrant audiences, or operating in exile, immigrant journalists working in U.S. community media today must navigate a tightening grip on their First Amendment rights, immigration status, and personal safety — often from within the U.S. as well as overseas, and increasingly from within their own communities.

Over the course of the last year, the Asian Media Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Center for Community Media worked with a group of immigrant and exiled journalists working in in-language and community-centered media serving Afghan American, Arab American, Bangladeshi American, Chinese-speaking, Indian American, and Indonesian American community journalists across the U.S. Many struggled not only to keep themselves safe, but also their predominantly immigrant reporting staff, as well as the undocumented and otherwise vulnerable immigrant audiences they served.

The journalists we worked with were on student visas, came from homelands at war or experiencing anti-democratic crackdowns, and lived in communities that were being targeted by immigration enforcement operations. Some of the print outlets’ most reliable advertisers were being influenced by extremist movements, powerful corporations, or state governments from abroad, as well as rising pressures from tariffs. All digital outlets were navigating transnational repression, surveillance from within the U.S., as well as escalating digital harassment and doxxing.

Like all community media led by and serving Black, Latino, AAPI, Indigenous, and LGBTQ audiences, these news outlets are understaffed and underresourced, often off the radar of major advertisers and news philanthropy. Sometimes, their efforts to cut costs can expose them to authoritarian tactics from overseas, such as Internet shutdowns commonly used as a tool of repression across South and Southeast cutting immigrant neighborhoods off from news during student uprisings in Nepal or Bangladesh, or amid military operations in Kashmir. Authoritarian regimes are taking notice of immigrant media — one Chinese-language journalist told me that a representative of state media routinely wrote down the names of publishers picking up their print editions from a local printer, and just a few months ago, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan made it illegal for local residents to “collaborate” with exiled media covering their circumstances for their refugee and diaspora news audiences.

In other instances, their efforts to engage their audiences on social media or messaging platforms can enable overseas governments to censor their work, ideological groups to organize harassment campaigns, so-called self-media to steal and modify their work, or invite vicious trolls and cybertroops. And in increasingly ideologically divided communities, small community-based newsrooms can find themselves facing threats, retaliation, intimidation, boycotts, and quid pro quo coverage demands from within their own communities.

Immigrant journalists tell me that they have resorted to a range of different tactics to protect themselves, their immigrant staffers, and their audiences from violent immigration enforcement. Some have their staffers on visas withhold bylines or pivot to desktop reporting rather than attend protests or attempt to cover enforcement operations. Others send volunteers with burner phones pre-loaded with immigration attorney contact information to accompany reporters. In a recent report on LGBTQ media, we are seeing these tactics employed by other vulnerable community media journalists.

In the nineteenth century, when ethnic press emerged alongside popular news media, the Black press served as the beacon for how journalism could advance multiracial democracy, advocating against Asian exclusion, hiring immigrant journalists who couldn’t find work in white-led media, and platforming LGBTQ writers.

Today, the so-called community media landscape is larger, more robust, and expanding faster than ever before, ranging from legacy ethnic newspapers to glossy magazines to podcasts and multimedia platforms to investigative and human rights documenting projects from journalists in exile. Community journalists are also more siloed, isolated, and less visible than ever before. If we believe that journalism can and should advance multiracial democracy, even at this moment when its future in the U.S. seems fragile and threatened, we must invest in immigrant-led media, and build strong networks that enable immigrant, LGBTQ, Black, and Indigenous journalists to share strategies, pool resources, collaborate on their reporting, and help keep each other safe.