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As I watched the momentous debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump on June 27, I found myself becoming deeply offended. The reaction was unfamiliar to me. Dispassion has been my reporter’s default mode for observing political events, and especially consequential campaigns in the United States, throughout a four-decade journalism career. I have worked for publications—the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and most recently the Marshall Project—that have rigorous guidelines prohibiting partisan public activity by journalists. I have respected those guidelines and abided by them willingly.
While many observers were shocked by Biden’s dazed appearance and mumbling answers, my reasons were more specific. I was appalled by the president’s utter failure to respond to Trump’s assault on immigrants. I’ve been writing about immigration since 2006, when I was first assigned to cover the national immigration beat by the Times. While the coverage of the debate focused overwhelmingly on Biden’s evident aging, it has been largely forgotten that Trump that night unleashed a barrage of the dehumanizing mistruths about recent migrants that have become a driving message of his dystopian campaign. He said the United States’ southwest border was “considered the most dangerous place anywhere in the world,” an affirmation that might surprise anyone residing near, say, the border between Ukraine and Russia. Trump said Biden had decided to “open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylums, terrorists,” and he said those predators were “killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen before,” assertions I knew to be egregiously false. Trump spoke approvingly of a massive deportation operation to “get them out fast,” and blamed migrants in plainly xenophobic terms for an imagined erosion of the national culture, saying, “We’re literally an uncivilized country now.” I sat there watching as Biden did nothing to counter Trump’s fact-free claims or to rise to a positive defense of immigrants.
I realized I faced a choice. It was starkly clear to me that Biden no longer had the capacity to wage a successful campaign against Trump. It was equally clear that so many immigrant families I had come to know over the years would be at grave risk if Trump returned to the White House. In addition, Trump had been increasingly aggressive in threatening retribution against journalists who portrayed him negatively. No story I could write would bring about the remedy I felt was urgently needed: Biden had to step out of the race. But the Marshall Project handbook is unambiguous: “Staff does not engage in partisan political activity that might compromise our reputation for fairness and accuracy.”
On July 8, I resigned as a contributing writer at the Marshall Project. In a message to my colleagues, I said I could no longer follow the rules because I believed Trump was “an existential threat to our democracy and our right to practice journalism freely.” I added, “I’ve seen the dynamism [immigrants] bring to our country, and the devastation that disastrously broken immigration and border systems can wreak on their families. They deserve better from our leaders.”
However, I also wrote that I continue to believe the nonpartisan guidelines are “fundamental to the independent, clear-eyed fact-finding journalism that you all practice so well.” My decision, I said, was only the right one for me at this time.
Then I crossed a line.
I began to learn the discipline of impartial journalism covering the wars in Central America in the 1980s. In that Cold War era the United States, in the name of anti-communism, was backing repressive governments in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras that were facing rebel insurgencies, while covertly supporting a guerrilla army against the then-popular revolutionary Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. American journalists were generally skeptical of US policy and exposed terrible human rights abuses by US-backed militaries. Reporters’ investigations revealed the extent of American funding for the contras in Nicaragua. But I learned through experience on the ground to keep a distance from the ideological passions of the armed combatants on both sides, in order to maintain access to both camps and to avoid missing the realities of a story because my vision was clouded by bias. Preserving our neutrality as the press corps was also a matter of personal safety, in wars we covered by driving rental cars over dirt roads into battle zones, with nothing more than white flags to dissuade fighters—of whatever affiliation—from shooting at us.
Keeping my personal views in check also helped me to cover immigration, an issue that was bitterly divisive long before Trump came into politics. In 2008 I covered the raid on a kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, in which nearly four hundred undocumented workers, many from Guatemala, were arrested. I reported jarring scenes of workers held in chains in cattle stalls and prosecuted in mass trials because they wanted to work and had used fake papers to do it. Underage minors had been working the night shift, wielding knives on slaughter lines through the sleepless graveyard hours. Most of the workers were sentenced to terms in federal prison and then deported. The facts of the Postville events were so wrenching, they sustained a vivid narrative with little or no editorial fill from me.
One of my most-read stories for the Times came in 2015, when I reported that Disney had laid off more than two hundred American tech workers at the theme park in Orlando and replaced them with immigrants from India on temporary visas, whom the Americans were forced to train. I discovered the story from studying official visa data and watching a Republican-led hearing in Congress. The story drew thousands of comments, back when that was not at all common. Outraged readers canceled their vacations at Disney World. Conservative commentators, who have long argued that immigrants displace American workers, hailed the story. Research generally shows that immigrants do not, in fact, take jobs from Americans. But in this case Disney had violated the intent, if not the precise legal terms, of the Indians’ temporary work visas, and it was my job to expose the abuse. Over forty years I worked many late nights to make sure I had the facts straight in my stories, building up what I now see was my most valuable asset as a journalist: my credibility.
A piece I wrote for the Marshall Project in June 2020, titled “The True Costs of Deportation,” informed my decision to become politically active this year. Esperanza Pacheco, a Mexican mother who had been raising her family with four US citizen daughters in Painesville, Ohio, had been deported under President Trump based on a misdemeanor infraction from fifteen years earlier. While Pacheco was trying to parent her teenage daughters via WhatsApp from her exile in Mexico, two of the girls, bullied in school and in anguish over the absence of their mother, tried to kill themselves. I learned that the deportation of a parent often leaves that kind of devastation in its wake, and I could envision the damage to immigrant families of Trump’s proposal to deport more than a million people. That story, like many others I wrote, included a vein of analysis. It showed that expelling immigrants who are not criminals brings steep costs to American communities, without improving public safety. I evaluated public policy without calling for any politician’s particular solution, leaving advocacy to the advocates.
Before this year I voted regularly, but nothing else. I’ve been a registered Democrat, because I live in a New Jersey county so blue that the competitive elections are the primaries. After my resignation, I became an active voter. I persistently (some might say annoyingly) called my lawmakers in Congress, texted Governor Phil Murphy, and fired off letters to the White House, to former president Obama and anyone else I could think of, imploring them to tell Biden to step aside. Amazingly, he did.
Since August, I’ve been canvassing for Vice President Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania. I have never donated to any race and I won’t start now—to the exasperation of the Democratic bots bombarding me with fundraising texts. I have no paid or otherwise direct relationship with any campaign. There is still a lot of journalism for me to do, but it will be in an opinionated realm. I’m working on a book about the movement of undocumented youth, and I still have plenty to say about how to fix our dysfunctional immigration system. But I know I cannot go back to nonpartisan news.
Yet from this side of the line, I am if anything more aware of the value of that impartiality. I encourage younger journalists to adhere to it. With our profession under siege on so many fronts, it remains important for reporters to stick to the core tasks of fact-finding; to pursue the investigation wherever it leads; to understand that journalism is the privilege to tell other people’s stories, not our own; to realize that factual reporting can still be the bridge sustaining civil discourse between sides in a polarized country. I understand that in this media-saturated environment, it can be difficult for journalists to resist the compulsion to cry out and take sides when their reporting brings them face to face with terrible injustice. But by embracing political positions, reporters open themselves to being fairly accused of bias and to losing some of the audience willing to consider their stories. That is the loss I have taken. But after a long career, I’m happy to be of service out here on the other side, doing what I think is right in this moment to defend our freedom to produce the clear-eyed journalism so fundamental to our democracy.
Julia Preston covered Central America for many years and shared the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for coverage of drug corruption in Mexico. She was the national immigration reporter for the New York Times from 2006 to 2016 and most recently wrote for the Marshall Project. She is the author, with Samuel Dillon, of Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy (2004), which recounts Mexico’s transformation over three decades from an authoritarian state into a struggling democracy.