Laura C. Morel will spend the coming year covering immigration for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting under a special reporting fellowship focused on migrant children and families.
Morel previously was a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, where she covered criminal justice issues. She was a 2017 finalist for a Livingston Award, which recognizes young journalists, for an investigation with two other reporters into police calls at Walmart.
In 2016, Morel became one of Reveal’s inaugural investigative fellows. The program offers reporters embedded at their home outlets a stipend, training and mentoring from Reveal to pursue an investigative project. It is aimed at increasing diversity among the ranks of investigative journalists. Morel’s fellowship project exposed the extent of Florida’s gun theft problem.
Born and raised in Miami, Morel is fluent in Spanish.
Seyni Malick Diagne lived in the U.S. for 17 years. Battling cancer, he was deported last month to Mauritania, where he faces arrest and enslavement.
Nearly a month ago, a judge ordered immigrant children removed from a troubled Texas facility and told the government to stop drugging them without consent. That hasn’t happened.
Even as it fails to reunify hundreds of families, the federal government says the court oversight mandated in a landmark case is no longer needed.
Besides separation, trauma is triggered by other factors: limited phone calls, crowded cells, lack of information about family whereabouts.
A judge has OK’d a plan to reunite 366 children with their deported parents. But questions linger about whether reunifications will occur in the U.S.
Nearly 1,600 children have been reunited with their parents, the government reports. The parents of another 559 aren’t eligible for reunification.
More than a week after a judge ordered that immigrant children staying at the facility should be moved, more than two dozen children are still there.
An attorney confirms reports that a child has died following release from a Texas immigrant detention center. ICE says it is looking into the case.
Thieves use rocks, bricks and even trucks to smash storefronts and gain access to hoards of weapons, a Tampa Bay Times and Reveal investigation finds.
A thriving supply chain provides criminals in Florida tens of thousands of guns, an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and Reveal has found.