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Early in my career as a journalist, I had dinner with a source who would be assassinated less than two years later. Francisco Piedragil Ayala, president of the state coffee council in Guerrero, Mexico, spoke in slow, deliberate Spanish, his snow-white hair tied back. “I think—no, I know—that you and the young people like you are the light at the end of the darkness we are in,” he said, a gleam in his eye. “The way you are going to illuminate it is by learning. By getting to know.”

We were at a restaurant in Acapulco, where my editor had asked me not to stay out late because he was worried about cartel violence. But I was riveted by Piedragil. As the ocean blackened beside us, I took notes and asked questions. At twenty-two, I had moved to Mexico City to cover soft commodities—coffee, cacao, and other crops—for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. My job was to track their production in Mexico and Central America. But the deeper I went into the mountains and villages, the clearer it became that I wasn’t just reporting on supply chains. I was witnessing the silent machinery behind mass migration.

Piedragil told me that multinational industries were destroying the earth and displacing people. He’d led a longtime resistance to corporate extraction, such as by setting fire to coffee skins destined for Nestlé. When we met, he was helping opium poppy farmers become small-scale quality coffee farmers so that they could be free of the cartels and demand fair prices for their beans. Piedragil told me that the rapacious harvesting of the earth had to end. Otherwise, he said, the earth would become “a machine that will be able to feed only machines.”

He was pointing me toward a truth that our country’s political focus on the border obscures. Poverty and violence, the conditions that are often cited as “root causes” of migration, are symptoms of the industrial pillaging that he was fighting. That plunder—by corporations and cartels, at the behest of corrupt officials—is what was driving people from their homes. “I don’t care what you write about,” Piedragil told me. “I understand that you’ve got to get paid and that they only care to publish certain things.” He knew that my article would be limited to an economic report on rising coffee prices. “But,” he continued, “I can see the wheels turning in your brain.”

Piedragil was planting seeds that would mature long after his assassination, years after I returned to the US to become a border reporter for KPBS in San Diego, then wrote an investigative biography of Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s immigration policies, and became an opinion columnist and commentator.

Earlier this year, as I watched the inward creep of the border under the second Trump presidency, it dawned on me: Every day, the border appears in the news as a wall, a fence, or a fixed stretch of land. Inert, unmoving. But the border is a mobile machine. The US has long outsourced border enforcement to Mexico and other countries. Now US federal agents have been deputized to carry the border deep into the US, dragging its violence and impunity to Chicago, Los Angeles, and other American cities; meanwhile, the Supreme Court has affirmed that those agents can target people based on their skin color, language, or low-wage jobs.

I worry about the border settling inside of the journalists who cover it.

Journalists are trained to privilege what we can see. It is easier to photograph concertina wire and corrugated barriers than to trace the snaking patterns of a system that manufactures disposability in the Americas and beyond. But the border is more than its steel. It is the circuitry that is turning the earth into a factory and people into its moving parts. It is a tool of caste, sorting human beings into categories of worth based on race, language, and class. It is the most effective instrument of the machine Piedragil warned about—a machine that can feed only machines.

The border was never confined to the borderlands. I worry about the border settling inside of the journalists who cover it, partitioning our minds and relationships. What began as a geopolitical barrier has become an internal one, regulating whom we can see, how we can feel, what futures we can imagine.

By describing the border only in terms of walls and trespass, the US news media distracts from the architecture of global inequality that our border sustains. We collude in its function: the separation of Americans from Americans across the Americas, from people across the world—from our shared history and humanity.

To report honestly, journalism must become unbordered.

What does unbordered journalism look like? First, journalists must refuse to treat the “border” as the origin point of immigration stories. Local reporting out of Los Angeles this year about the Trump administration’s racialized immigration enforcement is a case study in unbordered reporting.

Stories like “‘They run, we chase’: Immigration raids test limits of ‘probable cause,’” by Rachel Uranga and Brittny Mejia for the Los Angeles Times, and “Feds Arrest and Injure Two American Citizens During Raid in Ladera Heights, Leaves One Unconscious” by Izzy Ramirez for LA Taco shed light on how the border has become unmoored—snaking between white and brown, between Americans and neighbors, between citizens and their once-protected rights.

Another defining characteristic of unbordered journalism is that it does not let the border dictate who is worthy or unworthy. Xochitl Gonzalez’s article in The Atlantic, about Narciso Barranco, a father of US Marines who was pummeled by a Border Patrol agent, centered the humanity of people whom the border marks as disposable.

Bordered reporting, on the other hand, endows the border with greater authority than is accorded the people it is built to exclude. A 2023 New Yorker magazine article about Biden’s border policy is one such example; it starts and ends at the border, and frames immigrants as “numbers” and “bodies.”

Unbordered reporting, in contrast, does not avoid the complexity of people and their backgrounds. It shows how migration is shaped by global forces including wars, weapons trafficking, corporate extraction, and climate change. One story that made a lasting impression on me was a 2019 report in the New York Times by Nick Casey, a former Wall Street Journal colleague of mine, about the vanishing of Lake Poopó in Bolivia. The piece showed how the lake’s disappearance threatened not only the livelihood but “the very identity” of the region’s oldest Indigenous community, the Uru-Murato. It helped inform Americans about migration without centering migration or borders at all.

To achieve unbordered reporting, news organizations should invest in foreign bureaus with migration beats, and give conscientious reporters time and resources to pursue in-depth immigration projects. Jonathan Blitzer’s 2024 book *Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here *is a model for this type of reporting, with its sweeping, human-centered look at immigration from Central America and the role of US intervention. Similarly, Roberto Lovato’s 2020 memoir Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, illuminates the ripple effects of US-backed violence in El Salvador.

Whenever possible, immigration reporting should strive to be not only geographically but also temporally unbordered. That means uncovering histories of slavery, genocide, and eugenics that help the public understand what is happening in the current day.

Caitlin Dickerson’s 2021 piece in The Atlantic “America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses” is exemplary, showing how the US immigration system has never been colorblind and was built to exclude non-whites. Another illuminating example is the 2019 New York Times story tracing the impact of Cordelia Scaife May’s fears of foreign breeding on today’s anti-immigrant movement.

And news coverage should be** **politically unbordered, holding all leaders accountable without deference. It is nonpartisan, yet partial to human rights. Under the Obama presidency, Maria Hinojosa was one of the few reporters who pursued an unwavering examination of his administration’s anti-immigrant cruelty. Her 2011 PBS Frontline documentary “Lost in Detention” exposed how Obama’s record-high deportations targeting “felons, not families” had the effect of separating innocent mothers and fathers from their children. The film also examined problems of sexual assault and other abuses in detention facilities.

Another reporter who repeatedly called attention to the Obama-era assault on immigrants was Roberto Lovato, the author of Unforgetting. But he often faced an uphill battle with editors. “The protection of the Democratic Party by editorial rooms throughout the nation has enabled fascism,” he told me. “The material fact of tens of thousands of children separated from their mothers was not that different under Obama and Trump—but newsrooms weren’t willing to report seriously on the Democrats’ role in building the deportation machine.”

Maria Hinojosa, center, reports from El Salvador. Photo credit: Ivan Manzano.

The most powerful stories live in the spaces between categories. Though most papers separate immigration news and labor news into distinct desks, coverage of immigrant rights and workers’ and civil rights is deeply connected. For instance, a recent piece in The Intercept points to how the erosion of immigrant rights is evolving into the dissolution of privacy and due process nationwide.

Just as corporations strip the soil for profit, technology firms are stripping us of privacy and free will, feeding our data into vast systems of monitoring and control.

Unbordered reporting understands that the border is a laboratory for surveillance capitalism, which is constructing a world where human beings are programmable. It understands that the underclass status of some immigrants enables other exploitations; the solution is not criminalization, as conservative media and politicians suggest, but legalization.

When offering policy recommendations, columnists and commentators should highlight pathways to citizenship and other protections that would reduce economic inequality by emancipating the engineered underclass. Right now, conservative media outlets such as Breitbart and the National Review dominate reporting at the intersection of labor and immigrant rights, giving Trump the scaffolding to pit American workers against immigrant workers by framing them as at odds. Unbordered journalism sees through the false dichotomy between those two groups. Honest journalism needs to fill the vacuum in that space.

The unbordered journalist knows that accuracy does not come from detachment. It comes from attention.

Finally, I think that immigration reporting needs to acknowledge the positionality of the writer—feelings, identities, and lived experiences—rather than pretending to report from nowhere. Memo Torres, a reporter for LA Taco, starts his reports with references to the “ICE siege of LA,” positioning his dispatches as a form of resistance.

This type of language may be uncomfortable for a reporter working in a traditional mode at a legacy newspaper. But I would argue that it is truer and more honest than a lot of reporting that performs neutrality. Many centrist and left-of-center news outlets remain committed to outdated notions of impartiality at a time when conservative media is leaning hard into personality and propaganda. Journalists who value accuracy cannot regain the trust of general audiences until and unless we begin to embrace authenticity.

Hinojosa has modeled unbordered reporting for decades. Her Pulitzer Prize–winning podcast Suave, which follows one man’s journey across the boundaries of prison and freedom, approaches the story through the lens of Hinojosa’s friendship with him. The podcast challenges the journalistic tradition of keeping an emotional distance from sources. Hinojosa embraces reporting from the heart—not to sentimentalize, but to restore dignity to lives that are stripped of it by many in politics and the media. Her practice of unbordered reporting is to refuse the artificial walls between fact and feeling, between journalist and subject.

Suave recounts Hinojosa’s decision to send Christmas cards to her source in prison because it felt like the human thing to do. Because of disclosures like this one,

Hinojosa has dealt with accusations of bias her entire career. But the unbordered journalist is authentically herself. She knows that accuracy does not come from detachment. It comes from attention. When we refuse to reduce our humanity, we are more capable of recognizing others’ humanity. We become more curious.

Hinojosa’s advice to journalists is to approach immigrant sources with respect. “Respect, not empathy. Respect,” she told me. “Understand that the people you’re speaking to have the capacity to teach you life lessons that no one else can.”

Unbordered journalism pushes us to ask deeper questions, to listen for what lies beneath dominant narratives, to see the systems that invisibly shape what we call “news.” It does not distort reality; it restores it.

On one of the last days I saw Piedragil before he was murdered, I attended a meeting he led with small-scale coffee farmers deep in the mountains of Guerrero. The farmers spoke of their gratitude for his help in gaining national recognition for their coffee and in earning a decent living. But they were worried. They wanted to know what they should do if they lost Piedragil’s leadership. How could they resist corporations and cartels without him? He reassured them. He told them they had the wind at their backs; they didn’t need him anymore. All they had to do now was remember one thing. “You’ve got to make yourselves alive,” he said.

The heart of aliveness, he said, is connection: building coalitions to protect our common humanity. That is unbordered reporting at its finest: It organizes. It collaborates. It rages against the destruction of life.

If the border is part of a machine that feeds machines, then unbordered reporting is the act of jamming its gears. It is how we resist systems of extraction and begin to write a different future—one that honors the lives and lands that Piedragil died defending, and the human gifts of learning, of getting to know.

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