Jude Joffe-Block on Reporting on Communities in Crisis

Your Fellows project, Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Versus the Latino Resistance, tells the story of Latino activists who brought down the powerful Arizona sheriff. How did this project develop? Is the finished project different from how you imagined it would be when you first started out?

In 2012, I was a public radio reporter in Phoenix and began covering a federal civil rights lawsuit Latino motorists brought against Joe Arpaio and his office for racial profiling. A few years later, I teamed up with narrative journalist Terry Greene Sterling to write a book about the lawsuit, which spoke to the bigger political fights playing out in Arizona after the state passed a spate of harsh immigration laws. Arpaio had championed those laws, and Latino activists and civil rights groups had protested and challenged them. The scope of the book changed when it became clear that Donald Trump’s presidential bid was relying on the same Arizona/Arpaio playbook to rally a base around demonizing unauthorized immigrants. Trump’s presidency changed the scope of the book once again when he pardoned Arpaio for a criminal contempt of court charge—which had stemmed from violating a judge’s orders in the racial profiling case. These changes meant many new drafts to accommodate new themes and characters.

You co-wrote the book with Terry Greene Sterling. What was the collaborative writing process like and do you have any tips to share for successful collaborative writing?

We each brought different strengths to the project. Terry had already authored one book about immigration and Arizona, Illegal, and she is an experienced narrative longform writer. I came to the project with the insights I had gained from daily reporting on the racial profiling lawsuit, as well as other Arizona civil rights litigation. Working on a project like this one, where we were following many different characters and themes over years, it was great to have two brains trying to figure out how to winnow down a massive amount of material and weave it into a coherent story.

Your reporting has covered communities in crisis including migrants seeking asylum in the United States and ICE detainees suffering from COVID-19. How do you approach interviews with people who have experienced, or may still be experiencing, traumatizing events? How do you balance protecting their privacy and safety with providing detailed and accurate reporting?

I’m glad these questions are getting raised more in immigraiton reporting circles. To understand this country’s immigration system, it’s critical that journalists include the voices and experiences of people navigating the system firsthand. And yet, there can be risks for those who agree to participate in our stories. When talking to sources who are new to the country and unfamiliar with media, I like to walk through with them what it would mean to participate in an interview before they give consent. We talk about whether there are details that could put them in danger, and whether they feel comfortable having their full name and photo used, or not. Questions for asylum seekers about why they fled could be re-traumatizing, and should only be broached when in a private, secure setting. In 2019, I collaborated with fellow immigration reporters Valeria Fernández and Perla Trevizo on a piece for Investigative Reporters & Editors Journal about navigating these ethical issues.

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