It took me a day to realize that, when my source said they were trying to connect me with “the American lady who got interrogated by ICE,” they were talking about a different person than I had asked about.
Every day since January 20, the number of people detained by immigration officials in our community grows. And every day our team pulls a little more thread on the breadth of the immigration detention operations happening in our area.
We’re a scrappy team of five trying to track the movements of an especially chaotic federal government, so we are always behind this curve. Chasing after it.
We’ve reported on a fraction of these stories, but all of them live in our heads and weigh on our hearts. Some people we’ve spoken to have been too afraid to even speak with a reporter, much less go on the record with their story. It’s something reporters get used to, and it is never RANGE’s policy as a community newsroom to push people to put themselves, their families or communities in harm’s way.
The result, though, is a crisis in Spokane that many people don’t see. And our local newsrooms, including RANGE, aren’t built to meet the need.
Yet.
We keep hearing about families torn apart — together at church one minute, only for one partner to disappear by the time the other partner and kids get home from running errands. We keep hearing about people voluntarily giving away their rights because men with guns tell them to.
There’s more than a news gap in Spokane, there’s a basic information gap.
All of us have certain rights under the law, regardless of our immigration or citizenship status. The government has specific legal burdens and responsibilities under the law, whether they tell you they do or not. But the first step to defending your rights is knowing you have them in the first place. Many of our neighbors don’t.
This information gap has created a rights gap.
It’s been just over four years since RANGE wrote its first story about the uniquely impossible and often life-threatening place US law and border policy puts migrants — especially laborers — with our story about the near death of Eduardo Muñoz Lara (Essential, but Unprotected, Feb 2021). Since then, we’ve had countless conversations with local advocates and organizers about how badly communities need actionable information to stay safe.
That need is amplified when a person’s first language isn’t English.
For years, organizations like Latinos en Spokane, Mujeres in Action and (more recently in our area), Familias Unidas por la Justicia, have warned us that Spanish-speaking migrants are just the most convenient targets, and that our deportation apparatus would broaden its reach if it could.
That is exactly what has happened (‘They just take people’, Feb 2025).
I live in fear that the ground is shifting so quickly none of us can keep up, but we certainly have a better shot if we have an accessible source of news. On the other hand, I live in tremendous hope for what might happen once we have the capacity to do this work, and just how many people in the Spokane community would show up to stand in solidarity once these stories can penetrate barriers of community, culture and language.
Spokane needs — and our neighbors deserve — Spanish-language news and reporting. We have always needed it.
We need it today more than ever.
To jump straight to how you can support bilingual news in Spokane, click here.
It took me over two years to realize no one is coming to save Spokane.
That’s how long RANGE has been writing emails and grant applications to foundations all over the US looking to fund bilingual journalists.
That’s how long we’ve been knocking on every halfway promising door trying to tell the story of the unique challenges families here face, and how, despite what they may think they know about so-called “blue states,” our region needs a dedicated, Spanish-language news team to fill some truly huge information gaps and build the kind of trust communities deserve to have in any media that claims to serve them.
I knew this would be an uphill battle. I’ve spent a lot of my professional life trying to convince people who may have never heard of Spokane that my hometown is a place worth caring about.
And philanthropy, in a very real sense, is built on pity. The hardest-luck cases — as decided by some of the wealthiest people in a community or a nation — get the most money.
From a national lens, Spokane has never been broken enough to be sexy to philanthropists. Our region has faced the withering and uneasy transition away from extraction industries – but our economy isn’t as bad as the rust belt! We have thousands of migrant farm and construction laborers working in awful conditions under constant threat – but not as many as California or Texas!
Our neighbors are being rounded up and taken from their families near their homes, jobs and places of worship, but — and this is a direct quote from a recent call I had with a funder — “It’s going to be hard to build a case for RANGE, because Washington is a blue state.”
That was one of the more encouraging conversations I’ve had recently. The program officer I spoke with was incredibly kind, and we’re still pursuing that funder, helping explain why the Inland Northwest and RANGE deserve support.
But after more than two years of hearing similar feedback, it really feels like time to refocus on the one place we can trust will care about the health, safety and lives of Spokanites: Spokane itself.
To be fair to myself: Spokane isn’t the wealthiest place, and big, national foundations have big, national dollars. I had been hoping to use national money to demonstrate how much good we can do before asking our community to pay for it.
To be fair to the industry: RANGE has been the beneficiary of a lot of support over the years, from local and even some national funders — support we wouldn’t be here without. But our community can’t wait for the sentiments of a single funder or the national mood to look our way before we take action. Spokanites and people across our entire region are under threat right now.
