2021 Online Video Storytelling – Pandemic – Large Team
Detroit Free Press investigative reporters worked for months to uncover the identities of Michigan’s first victims of COVID-19. Over 100 interviews with family members of the deceased were conducted. From those, 20 were selected to recount the lives of their loved ones during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Because victims and their families were scattered throughout Metro Detroit and across Michigan, these interviews were conducted and recorded by phone. Combined, their voices speak as one and lay the narrative framework for this video. Each family supplied a single portrait of their loved one, which the videographer then printed and filmed in a studio setting. It is a testament to the lives we’ve lost as well as government missteps along the way.
Jorge, Lourdes and Admild had two things in common: they were all deported from the United States, and they all had COVID-19. They weren’t alone. From March to June the United States deported almost 40,000 immigrants, hundreds of whom had COVID-19. For the news-breaking multimedia investigation, “How ICE Exported the Coronavirus,” reporters Emily Kassie and Barbara Marcolini analyzed flight data to identify hundreds of international deportation flights to 138 countries. They spoke with ICE air pilots and flight attendants as well as foreign government representatives, and talked to sick immigrants inside detention centers in the United States as well as deportees quarantined in five countries. Their investigation reveals how Immigration and Customs Enforcement became a domestic and global spreader of COVID-19 during the pandemic—and how pressure from the Trump administration led countries to take in sick deportees. In extensive data collection using multiple flight tracking systems, they tracked over 750 domestic ICE flights since March 2020, carrying thousands of detainees to different centers, including those who were sick. They also tracked over 200 deportation flights carrying migrants, some of them ill with coronavirus, to other countries from March through June 2020. They were able to decode which flights were deportations through confirmations with pilots and air crew on the tail numbers of the deportation planes and their most frequent routes. The investigation has been used by the Women’s Refugee Commission in their fight to change DHS detainee and asylum policy, as well as by the city of New York in opposing the same policy. It was used as a reference in a U.S. House oversight hearing on ICE’s management of detention facilities during the coronavirus pandemic. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris publicly shared the investigation, saying that officials would be held accountable.
ON MARCH 13, St. Francis High School in Wisconsin temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After 92 days of quarantine, the students came back one last time for a graduation parade and reflected on their experiences.
