Journalists Need to Treat Migration as a Fight for Dignity
Kilmar Armando Abrego García’s case shows the perils of a nation that demonizes migrants.
It’s hard to keep telling the modern migrant story in the United States when the system itself is designed to erase the humanity of the people most affected. This has been the case for decades, and I won’t fault myself for doubting whether this will ever change.
Both political parties have long embraced “tough on immigration” posturing, demonizing migrants as national-security threats instead of human beings. Every president since the Clinton years has expanded enforcement and treated migrants as a faceless problem.
In 2003, when the memory of 9/11 was still fresh, the creation of a new agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), turbocharged a culture where the emphasis is on punishment, not protection. Now, with the passage of President Trump’s megabill — which allocates $170.7 billion over four years to immigration and border enforcement — our so-called “nation of immigrants” has lost its direction.
This obsession with immigrant enforcement has appeared in several stories throughout the years, all cruel, all un-American. The ongoing ordeal of Kilmar Armando Abrego García under the Trump administration illustrates how this has become the new American standard. A Maryland resident, Abrego García was wrongly deported to a brutal prison in El Salvador in violation of a court order.
When the administration finally brought him back to the United States, prosecutors in Tennessee charged him with transporting undocumented people, charges he has pleaded not guilty to. He was briefly reunited with his family on Aug. 22 before he learned he could be deported again — this time to Uganda, a country he has no ties to. Only after a federal judge stepped in was the administration’s plan halted, at least temporarily. Now we wait to see what will happen next.
The details are disturbing, but they point to something larger. While Trump flouted altered photos of Abrego García’s so-called “gang tattoos” — images that proved nothing — his administration has admitted to “administrative errors” even as it continues to strip people of rights and uproot their lives. The outrage should not be about which country Abrego García might be sent to. It should focus on how this cruelty has become routine and normalized.
What troubles me most is how American journalism handles stories like this. Too often, newsrooms fall back on the framing handed to us —“good” immigrant versus “bad” immigrant — and run with it. People have applied both labels to Abrego García, but the real story isn’t about which side he fits. It’s about how the system works: branding, detaining and discarding people as if they are disposable.
Cases like Abrego García’s expose the false promises baked into the system. Migrants are told to trust the process: Show up for hearings, obey the rules and wait for protection. But as I wrote in one of my MSNBC columns earlier this year, “what good is a system that pretends to offer protection but is designed to fail you?”
That broken trust isn’t limited to the courts. It extends into other aspects of life, including even the most basic obligations. For instance, millions of undocumented immigrants file taxes every year, believing it will count for something in the grand scheme of what this country claims to offer. Yet when the Trump administration proposed using IRS tax records for deportations, that trust collapsed.
As I wrote back in the spring: “The government’s use of tax records for immigration enforcement undermines the very premise of our democracy. The ability to file taxes without fear of retaliation is a cornerstone of civic participation. Once that is eroded, no one’s personal information is safe. If it can happen to immigrants, then it can happen to anyone.”
The immigration-enforcement system thrives on this contradiction, and Abrego García’s story is just getting more attention now because American journalism thinks it knows how to cover immigration stories. It doesn’t, and perhaps it never will. The truth is that this enforcement obsession has never worked. This country has poured billions into enforcement, and will spend billions more. None of it has changed the reasons people migrate.
“As long as people continue to see in the United States an opportunity to live safely, thrive economically, or reunite with friends and relatives who already call this country their home, more policing won’t work. They will outmaneuver law enforcement officials like they always have,” law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández wrote last year in The New York Times.
That is the lesson of Abrego García’s case. Cruelty has become routine, and journalism too often normalizes it.
“Promise me you’ll keep fighting, praying, believing in dignity and liberty, not just for me, but for all,” Abrego García said on Monday before he was detained again.
The responsibility for newsrooms is clear: Stop recycling the binaries, stop echoing the language of enforcement, and start telling the story of migration for what it is — not a threat, but a fight for what America should be.
Signal Boost
Councilmember Janeese Lewis George has introduced an innovative piece of local-journalism legislation in Washington, D.C. As she writes in The 51st, “the need for public investment in local journalism is dire.” We agree.
The Local News Funding Act would give “news coupons” to support local outlets, essentially a vote on how to distribute a pool of public money to local newsrooms. “If more residents allocate coupons to a particular outlet,” she explains, “that outlet receives a larger share of the funding.”
Councilmember Janeese Lewis George
An important gathering happened last weekend in Memphis, bringing together local activists and national allies (including Free Press’ Jenna Ruddock) who are fighting the damage from dirty data-center expansion that features Elon Musk’s efforts to build two giant Grok-powering facilities in Tennessee.
“We are speaking up because xAI and all of the companies that continue to think that our communities do not deserve investment, do not deserve to be included in the process, do not deserve to be listened to, you’re being put on notice that we ain’t taking it no more,” said Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson. “No more to a status quo of tech companies that believes their profits are more important than our people. No more to a status quo that has decided that our communities are somehow their sacrifice zone and not places of resilience that our ancestors prayed for. No more to the inequality. No more to the injustice. No more to the inopportunity. We standing up. We raising up.”
The Kicker
Pressing Issues is now officially an anti-Yankees newsletter.
About the author
Julio Ricardo Varela is the senior producer and strategist at Free Press. He is also a working journalist, columnist and nonprofit-media leader. He really hopes the Red Sox make the playoffs in 2025. Follow him on Bluesky.
