The day Erin Sellers told me sources had approached her about a toxic work culture at Latinos en Spokane, it was about a week after that organization’s Executive Director, Jennyfer Mesa, walked up to me at a meeting of a board we both sat on, and, with tears in her eyes, thanked me for the reporting our team at RANGE had been doing.
We had been covering ICE as closely as we could for months, and had just published stories about the violent arrest of Martin Diaz and Mesa’s own fears that she was being surveilled by federal agents. I got a little emotional myself, and thanked her for taking the time to tell me our work was helping.
“No one in Spokane is telling the immigrant story like you,” she told me, before walking back to her seat. I wasn’t taking notes, but I remember her words verbatim. They meant a lot.
This was last spring, early in Trump’s second term. When Sellers came to me just a few days later, I thought of that interaction, and took a deep breath. The benefit of being a community newsroom is a level of trust unlike any I’ve experienced in journalism. The downside isn’t really a downside: the trust people have is actually an expectation — our readers expect us to fight for them regardless of who the fight is against. Without fear or favor, as the old saw goes.
I asked the basic editor questions. Why us? They had seen Sellers’ stellar reporting on our local Planned Parenthood, and hoped she could help. What were the specific allegations? The sources hadn’t been very forthcoming, yet, but they seemed serious, and they seemed to center, not on the organization as a whole, but on the behavior of Mesa herself. How many people had we spoken with?
“I have two people, but I think more want to talk,” Sellers replied, “What should I do?”
I think my soul left my body when she asked that. If we decided to dig in, I knew it would be really difficult to navigate not just the reporting, but the implications to the community. My mind pinballed around to a dozen possible outcomes of an investigation of LeS. Every single one of them seemed brutal, and messy. I tried to imagine what kind of awful behavior — and to how many people — it would take to justify disrupting such an important organization at such a pivotal moment.
At the same time, I knew from personal experience that Mesa has an incandescent temper. I’ve seen her wield it dozens of times in service of holding powerful people and organizations to account. I would never hinge an investigation on outside interactions I had witnessed, but I also couldn’t pretend I didn’t know how devastating Mesa’s force of will can be.
I returned to my body. Erin was still staring at me — What should I do? I said the most decisively noncommittal thing I could think of. “Find more,” I said. If we were going to pursue this, we needed more than two voices.
“Okay,” she replied, “how many?”
Because LeS has a largely immigrant staff and proudly supports undocumented people, I assumed many if not all of our potential sources would request anonymity. As a newsroom focused on serving those with the least power, we are comfortable granting anonymity in situations like this, but we balance it with volume. I like to have three anonymous sources in any situation where one named source would suffice. That many voices wouldn’t be easy to find amid an immigrant worker base in Trump’s America.
I was also trying to weigh the potential future harm to workers if we didn’t publish against the harm to the vital work LeS does if we did publish. I asked myself how many people would need to have been harmed to justify dragging LeS through a public investigation. I had no clue how to quantify that. “It’s going to need to be overwhelming.”
///
Sellers asked her first two sources for people who could corroborate their stories, or who might have stories of their own, and came back with more names. Soon after she began contacting those people, I got a phone call from Mesa, followed by texts. Someone had told her Erin had been making calls, and she wanted answers.
Investigations take months and we like to conduct them quietly, for a couple of important reasons. 1) Truth. The longer you take (within reason), the closer to the truth you get. 2) Harm reduction. As a community newsroom, we don’t want to create unwarranted stress for any organization. And, as a dude who might see you in the grocery store, I don’t want you to know I’m looking into you until I know there’s a problem we need to discuss.
When Mesa reached out, we still had so many more people to talk to before we would be confident there was a story to tell. Getting those interviews would take most of the rest of 2025. Erin interviewed her final source to date just last week, while we were actively preparing to publish. Investigations like this take so much longer than most people realize.
So it was here I played dumb. I told her we would reach out if we decided to go through with a story, which was true, but it wasn’t helpful.
Mesa already did know we were looking into her, and playing dumb did more harm than good. I regret making that choice. Before I even realized the error, though, Mesa cut us off, “Y’all can talk to my attorney.” A month later she texted again, giving me that attorney’s name. “I and LES will no longer speak to RANGE,” she wrote.
I wish it wouldn’t have gone like that, but it helped me realize I owed more of myself to this story. If we were going to look into people’s concerns, I couldn’t allow myself to take a passive role. Sellers was still the writer, but I needed to sit in on as many interviews as I could. I wanted to look into people’s eyes. I wanted to ask my own questions.
I’m glad I did, because although Erin ended up with 10 voices telling very similar stories (and plenty of documents to back those stories up) — our most deeply sourced investigation to date — it wasn’t the number of stories that proved overwhelming to me.
What became overwhelming was hearing the lone voice of Jorge Guerrero finally crack at the end of a long interview with us, tears welling at the corners of his eyes, talking about the hopes he had when he got the job at LeS, and how completely those hopes had been crushed. How he had tried to atone for his own mistakes and tried to offer constructive feedback to Mesa to make the whole organization better, only to be fired on what seemed — to Erin and I — like spurious grounds.
It was overwhelming hearing the woman we are calling Alicia recount how her conflict with Mesa didn’t just lead to the termination of her contract at LeS. The conflict followed her as Mesa tried to get her new client to cancel their contract, too (a fact the contractor’s new client confirmed).
The number of people and the similarities of the stories they told was enough to go to print.
It was the agony on people’s tongues describing how what they thought was a dream job turned into a nightmare that made — for me — going to print our duty.
///
To LeS’ credit, they responded to our request for comment when Sellers and I finally reached out to present our findings. We met at their offices Monday morning. The whole board showed up and so did Mesa, along with staff members Karen Z., Monica G. and Miguel L.
They hadn’t brought their lawyer.
Mesa was subdued and answered our questions matter of factly, but she also had moments of frustration, calling the allegations “TMZ.” Twice she asked why we hadn’t tried to speak with current staffers who were presumably happy with the culture at LeS. We said we would be more than happy to interview anyone she could put us in touch with, a request she twice waved away. By this point, Sellers had heard from multiple former workers that while they were at LeS, they had been warned about the investigation and told not to talk to us.
I had thought perhaps the organization had heard how many people we had spoken with and had come to the table to do damage control. They had not. The board had shown up to demonstrate they believed Mesa’s version of events.
When Mesa asked us to name her accusers, and we named three named sources and a fourth person who appears in our piece under a pseudonym (that person fears are with federal authorities, not LeS), Mesa responded “yeah, not surprising there.” A couple of the board members across from me shook their heads.
The message LeS wanted to deliver is that these were troublemakers, not whistleblowers.
There’s a chance that’s true, and that RANGE spent 9 months getting hoodwinked by a group with an axe to grind. But there’s more to an in-person interview than the quotes that make the page. On Monday, while we didn’t get many useful answers, we did get some insight into the office culture.
They also answered our questions evasively: when we asked about serious, specific allegations of yelling at employees and behavior that might be considered harassment, Mesa pointed to the organization’s generous benefits package and the board nodded along.
In one case, Mesa categorically denied speaking ill of former colleagues herself and tolerating that kind of behavior in her staff. None of the staff members who joined us at the table spoke, except Monica G., who more than once made disparaging remarks about Richard Martinez and the other former employees we named. When Erin began to ask about Martinez’ work hours, Monica cut in “sorry to interrupt, but did he say how much time he spent watching movies at work?” Mesa shushed her. It’s a small detail, but it undercuts Mesa’s assertion the staff doesn’t gossip about former employees.
We also got a clear sense that Mesa believes she should get to play by a different set of rules than the rules she is on the record asking for from other organizations and institutions. You will read in Erin’s story how Mesa told us workers with complaints about not being paid or being treated poorly should use the proper state channels, such as L&I.
This floored me.
As Erin writes, RANGE covered the shortcomings of L&I with regards to immigrant communities in 2024. Mesa wasn’t just a source on that story. She’s the one who gave us that angle, pointing out how poorly equipped L&I is to support immigrants — and especially contract workers.
To have that memory clearly in my mind and then to hear Mesa say on Monday that contractors or employees — some with fragile immigration status — who had accused LeS of labor violations should just go through the proper government channels was a truly surreal experience.
To their credit, the LeS team gave us nearly two hours to ask our questions.
What no one gave us, was much acknowledgement at all that the organization understood real harm had been done — and not just to random workers. Every former worker RANGE cites is a member of the very community LeS had been created to protect.
Nothing in their responses gave us a sense that the organization planned to do things differently in the future.
///
One thing is definitely changing, though.
We had reached out to Mesa and the board on Wednesday, Feb. 28. By Thursday morning, they had requested meeting on Monday. Then, around 9 pm that night, LeS announced that Jennyfer Mesa would be stepping down as Executive Director and into a role leading “Strategic Initiatives,” with a focus on two priorities: “leading the capital campaign for our future building, SOMOS Community Development Project, and Immigration policy and advocacy.”
The organization said it plans to hire a new ED and also a Development Director. This is common. Often organizations who are founded by a dynamic leader find that, as they mature, it’s necessary to bring in leaders with different skill sets and experience. Sometimes the founders stay on in a more defined role that allows them to get back to doing the passion work that made them so dynamic in the first place.
When executed well, and when the outgoing leader embraces their new role, this can be an ideal situation.
But boards absolutely must make sure those new leaders have both the power sanctioned by the organization and the cultural power to run the organization as they see fit. That necessarily requires stripping power from the founder, and taking steps to change the company culture so it’s clear — even celebrated — that power has, in fact, shifted.
After hearing from our sources how exhaustively Mesa likes to control every level of work at LeS, though, I was eager to ask the board if they had taken steps to ensure Mesa wouldn’t just try to micromanage her new boss the way sources claim she micromanages staff.
The board said they had been working on this transition for over a year, but didn’t react to my question like they had considered these implications. I hope they do, both for Mesa’s sake, and the sake of the new leaders who will be hired to build the organization back.
I still believe strongly that Spokane needs an organization like LeS, but after 9 months of reporting and one disappointing conversation with leadership, I also believe the only way LeS can be the organization Spokane deserves is to own its mistakes and change.
I admit, I am concerned that our reporting here will lead to a catastrophic outcome for LeS. More funders could pull their money, or worse.
But this report also happens to come when the organization has chosen to restructure itself, and I will sleep very well at night, knowing that any prospective candidate for those leadership positions will have a sense of the power dynamics in the organization and some of the very real harms done.
I hope this doesn’t lead people to shy away from applying for those positions. On the contrary: I hope they use our reporting to gain a deeper sense of the work that needs to be done.
I hope even more strongly that the leaders the board decides to hire have a strong vision for how to build the caring and supportive culture inside the organization that the organization has always sought to build in the world at large.
In our interview, the first question we asked Mesa and the board is why each of them do this work.
Jose Barajas Zapeda, an architect I have known for over a decade as an artist and as one of the prime drivers of Spokane’s parklet movement, became emotional speaking about his childhood in North Idaho.
“It was super challenging. I was one of the few brown people in that town. And I don't want my daughter to go through that. That's why I'm excited about the future, about what LES is doing with the Somos project and the big picture that we're helping out this community so much.”
Later, as we were leaving, I thanked Barajas, who goes by Lupe, “I know that was hard.”
We weren’t recording at that point, but I’ll never forget his words. “I just hope,” he said, his voice breaking so much I could barely hear him, “you do the right thing.”
I really hope we have done the right thing, too.
I hope that Barajas’ work is so successful that his daughter gets to grow up in a world much improved by the work he and LeS are doing.
I hope just as strongly that RANGE’s work is so successful that nobody will ever have to suffer dehumanizing working conditions just to do a job they love.
///
Ultimately, reporters are not prosecutors. Editors are not judges. Journalism is not a legal system.
Journalists are a spotlight. It’s our job to highlight what we believe to be the good and the bad of our society, the reasons for concern and the reasons for hope.
We have complete discretion over the claims we investigate. We could have chosen to not investigate LeS, but then we couldn’t in good conscience pretend to be a newsroom dedicated to helping all workers.
As Sellers put it in her email asking Mesa for comment, “As a reporter, it would have been irresponsible and unfair of me not to take allegations of workers’ rights violations seriously just because they were coming from former workers of an organization doing important labor for our community.”
We don’t decide who is guilty and who is innocent. With community-serving organizations like LeS, the community does that. And so the community Latinos en Spokane serves will be the ultimate arbiter of this saga. It’s up to them to say whether we got this story right.
At RANGE, we believe we serve that same community, along with others. Better serving the Latino community in Spokane is so important we hired Daisy Zavala Magaña to report in Spanish.
If that community tells us we got this story wrong, we will do everything in our power to own that wrong and correct it. As always, anyone reading this can email me directly here.
