The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "immigration prison" ...
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A Damaged District
For more than a year, Zahira Torres overcame obstacle after obstacle to document one of the worst school cheating scandals in the nation's history. Where other cheating scandals involved altering accountability tests, the El Paso Independent School District gamed the state and federal accountability systems by targeting Mexican immigrant students. In a number of cases, district officials refused to enroll students or pushed out students already enrolled -- denying countless students their constitutional right to an education. In other cases, they arbitrarily reclassified grade levels or altered transcripts, all in an attempt to keep students out of the testing pool. Torres' reporting sparked numerous results. The superintendent who masterminded the scheme went to federal prison. The state education agency removed the school board. And when Torres' reporting documented that the state was aware of details of the cheating in 2010 and cleared the district anyway, the new education commissioner ordered an independent investigation of how the agency missed the cheating.
Tags: schools; scandals; education; school board
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Justice in the Shadows
Although immigration is one of America’s most divisive, visceral, and hotly debated issues, the public rarely gets a close look at the vast law enforcement network that every year detains more than 400,000 suspected illegal immigrants. Courts often operate inside prisons, far from view. Immigration officials play by rules that would not be permitted for the police or the FBI. Here is a system heavily shielded from public scrutiny. Reporting even routine activities is a challenge. Boston Globe reporters Maria Sacchetti and Milton J. Valencia, however, penetrated the wall of secrecy. Their three-part series, “Justice in the Shadows,” revealed a dysfunctional and largely unaccountable system that locks up people who pose little threat while releasing dangerous criminals back to US streets because their home countries won’t take them back. The results, Sacchetti and Valencia showed, at times can be deadly for Americans and foreigners alike. The reporting was anything but quick or easy. Sacchetti and Valencia filed more than 20 Freedom of Information Act requests to federal agencies that comprise the immigration system. Nearly all of them were partially or wholly denied, purportedly to protect the privacy of the immigrants. With the federal government blocking the way, Sacchetti and Valencia found other avenues to document what was happening inside this Byzantine system, investing a year to do so. The effort to shed light on the immigration system continues: The Globe has filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force the agency to reveal the names of more than 8,000 criminal foreigners released in the US because they couldn’t be deported.
Tags: security; Department of Homeland Security; illegal immigrants; FBI
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Prison Profiting: Behind Arizona's Immigration Law
NPR's report shows that private prison corporations helped to write Arizona 1070, its controversial immigration law. The story examines "the private prison companies' handin getting the law written and passed, beginning with a private meeting at the Hyatt in washington D.C and ending with extensive campaign contributions and political connections to lawmakers and the governor of Arizona."
Tags: immigration; private prisons; lobbying; Arizona 1070; illegal immigrant; illegal immigration; criminal justice
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"Beyond the Verdict"
After a minivan struck a school bus causing a wreck that killed four children, Olga Franco was accused of driving the van, convicted and sentenced to prison. Franco, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, maintains her innocence and says her then-boyfriend was operating the vehicle; however, he was not found in the vehicle when authorities arrived to the scene. The KMSP team investigates her claims to determine if the wrong person is in prison for the terrible tragedy.
Tags: Cottonwood MN; Olga Franco; Shakopee; Francisco Mendoza; DNA; illegal immigration
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Agriprocessors and Beyond: Inside the Kosher Meat Industry
This series of articles looked inside the kosher meat industry, a quietly guarded world worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The reporting began two years ago when the Forward's Nathaniel Popper wrote about the working conditions at the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse, Agriprocessors, in Postville, Iowa, setting off a wide-ranging debate in Jewish community. The paper has continued to follow the problems at Agriprocessors and reported early in 2008 on the debate withing the kosher industry about a widely used but apparently cruel method of kosher slaughter known as shackled and hoist. Then, in the middle of the year, federal agents, citing the Forward's reporting raided the Agriprocessors' plant in Iowa. Since the raid, the Forward has followed each legal development, but has also reported on elements of the story that were being overlooked. The first such article detailed the way in which Agriprocessors had handled immigrants and unions at its Brooklyn warehouse-sparking a case that went to the Supreme Court. The next set of articles investigated the working conditions in the rest of the kosher eat industry, with particular attention paid to the labor battles at Agriprocessors' biggest competitor, Alle Processing, which had been completely ignored. The article and chart on industry-wide conditions were the first effort to systematically set down the relative size and production of the major players in the kosher meat industry. The Forward also wrote a lengthy report on the immigrant workers from Agriprocessors who had been released from prison and ordered to testify in federal court against their supervisors, but were given no means to support themselves before the hearing date. After Agriprocessors declared bankruptcy, the Forward reported on the unnoticed consequences for the town and its inhabitants, from the lowly turkeys to the local bankers.
Tags: meat processing; kosher meat; agriculture; Agriprocessors; meatpacking; immigrant workers
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Careless Detention
Four-part series on the medical treatment of immigrant detainees in the United States. Goldstein and Priest exposed the shoddy, unethical and, at times, fatal treatment of immigrants during their detentions and as they were being deported to their native countries. Their stories led readers deep inside America's network of immigration prisons--a world that had grown exponentially in the years since 9/11, yet remained largely unknown and hidden from view. Their stories documented the deaths of 83 detainees. And in one of the most stunning revelation, Goldstein and Priest disclosed the previously unreported scope of a practice of forcible sedation of immigrants with dangerous psychotropic drugs during deportation to their native countries; they found more than 250 instances in which the drugs were used on people with no history of psychiatric problems. Their stories also revealed that the most prevalent cause of death among the immigrant detainees is suicide, including the hangings of detainees known to be in such fragile mental health that they had been assigned suicide watchers. They profiled the slipshod treatment of an ailing Korean immigrant, a legal U.S. resident for three decades detained in a rail in the Arizona desert, with a history of recurrent cancer. And they documented the flawed medical practices, bureaucratic ineptitude, sloppy record-keeping and staff shortages that cause detainees who are sick to suffer and sometimes to die.
Tags: detained immigrants; September 11th; 9/11; medical treatment of prisoners; immigration prison; HIPAA
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Abuses of Immigrant Detainees
This story explored the plight of immigrants detained in two New Jersey jails over the two year period from 2002-2004. An investigation into U.S. prison abuse abroad led to information on similar prison abuse in the U.S. Five former inmates of the Passaic County jail were interviewed and all of them detailed the same type of treatment at the hands of the guards including physical abuse and being threatened with attack dogs. As a result of this broadcast, the Department of Homeland Security immediately revised government policies and announced their own investigation into these claims of abuse.
Tags: immigrant; abuse; civil rights; human rights; FOIA
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The Un-Americans
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have begun to deport or imprison immigrants who committed minor crimes, sometimes jailing them without bail while they await deportation. This investigation looks into recent immigration laws that allow agents to deport immigrants or imprison them for minor offenses such as shoplifting. In some cases, the laws are retroactive and punish immigrants even more for crimes for which they have already paid. Prison conditions for some of these immigrants tend to be especially harsh and inhumane. This has been the case for Haskell prison, a privately-owned facility that is below the standards set by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.
Tags: deportation; immigration laws; Haskell prison; Texas Commission on Jail Standards; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; FOIA
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The death of state inmate Ifeanyi A. Iko
"Ifeanyi A. Iko, a 51-year-old Nigerian immigrant, was found dead in his cell on April 30 at Western Correctional Institution near Cumberland, Maryland. The authorities have refused to disclose nearly any information about his death, citing an internal investigation and an ongoing review by the FBI. But two Sun reporters followed up on his death, interviewed inmate witnesses by phone and by correspondence, obtained copes of policies and procedures through information requests, and developed a comparison of how Iko should've been treated vs. how he was really treated by correctional officers."
Tags: prison; asphyxiation; jail; inmate abuse
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The Bust
A Salvadorian immigrant woman is asked to give $5,000 to a state prison guard so he will let her husband free. The husband had cashed $700 in hot checks and that is why he was in prison. The woman contacted a Hispanic police officer. The police decided to set a trap for the prison guard. They hid and invited the news crew along. They put a wireless microphone on the Salvadorian woman. The authorities caught the prison guard on audio and videotape as he was taking the money from the woman, and promising the prisoner would not be deported. The prison guard was arrested and the husband of the Salvadorian woman was released when his term was up. The prison guard was sentenced to 6 years on probation.
Tags: TAPE; jail guard; jail; immigrant; police; police officer; hot check; check; sentence; INS; probation; deportation; hidden camera; hidden microphone; wired; liberty; blackmail.