Behind the Story: Why a Pulitzer Center Grantee Reached Out to Migrants Walking to the U.S.

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Chip Mitchell is a journalist reporting on public safety for WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate. Before joining WBEZ, Mitchell reported on conflict zones in Colombia and other Latin American countries. (In 2023, Mitchell was named a Longworth Media Fellow. He used his fellowship to examine the rise of Latin American authoritarian populism.)

In collaboration with the Chicago Sun-Times—as part of the Democracy Solutions Project, a multimedia series on democracy during the run-up to the 2024 presidential election—Mitchell and photographer Anthony Vazquez returned to Colombia. They reported on the nation’s efforts to integrate Venezuelan migrants. They also documented migrants' experiences as migrants passed through Colombia on a journey to the United States. 

As immigration continues to make headlines in the United States, Pulitzer Center Editorial Intern Morgan Varnado spoke with Mitchell about his June 15, 2024, report “Walking to the United States.” Along the route to North America, Venezuelan migrants—also referred to as caminantes—faced many trials and conflicts, including the Darién Gap, an isolated, dangerous mountain region bestriding the Panama-Colombia border. Along a highway within Colombia’s interior, Mitchell met caminantes before their encounter with the Darién Gap.

Varnado and Mitchell discussed the journalist’s time in Colombia, his behind-the-scenes perspective as a reporter, and his thoughts on immigration as Chicago and the rest of the nation are beset with inflammatory rhetoric targeting migrants and immigrants in general.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Morgan Varnado: Reading your article and looking over the work that you guys are doing was really intriguing. I wanted to take the opportunity to get your experience as the reporter behind the story.

You have talked about the stigmas Venezuelan migrants are facing. Is it hard battling outside stigmas that may encroach upon your reporting, while also trying to humanize people?

Chip Mitchell: Honestly, when I'm going into a story, I'm always trying to report about, generally, the people who are experiencing the worst, who are on the receiving end of any kind of abuse and are misunderstood and stigmatized.

That was the underlying motive for going there [to Colombia], we wanted to document how Colombia had handled this deluge of Venezuelan migrants and immigrants—much bigger than what we have received in Chicago. Colombia being a much smaller country, a much smaller economy, fewer resources, relatively poor compared to the United States, and yet they basically rolled out the welcome mat in a lot of ways. Notwithstanding this xenophobia [in Colombia] that has come and kind of swelled up.

They welcomed and integrated 1.9 million Venezuelans, providing them pathways into the education system, the health care system, to legal employment, and eventually citizenship. These are things that have not taken place in the United States, even though we've provided them temporary, protective status. It's very precarious, that status.

 We wanted to see how Colombia's done it. But underneath that, as a reporter, what I'm always trying to do, and what I definitely wanted to do on this trip, was just to humanize these people—the migrants.

Because the same people, the same sorts of people who are making their way to Chicago. They get here and a lot of the stigma that they face, the xenophobia, in Colombia is not very different from what they face in the United States.

 In fact, probably worse here—in a lot of ways, yeah. Especially painful here in Chicago.

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MV: I did want to ask you specifically about your experience covering the story “Walking to the United States” One thing that really stood out to me was the interviews, the quotes that you were able to get from the caminantes, the photos that you're able to take of them.

In the story, you mentioned this man on a motorcycle that had been following them for a while, just taking photos. They didn't know if that was the police or something else. Thinking of the danger that these people may face, just traveling from one place to another, was it hard to gain the trust of the caminantes for interviews? What was that process like?

CM: Well, it was surprising. It was really easy, because it was hot already. This was a low, low altitude, Cúcuta. It's not like Bogotá is, way up in the mountains, 8,500 feet. Cúcuta is like 500 feet. So it's really hot, tropical, and it was April, so every day is hot.

We stopped at a grocery store and packed the trunk with water.

I think it's just kind of awful to think people come out of journalism schools—or they used to anyway—just kind of thinking like you never share anything with your subjects. You can't give them anything. You can't pay them money. … I don't pay anyone money ... For the privilege of finding some shade and talking with some people for 20, 30 minutes, the least we can do is have a whole bunch of water for them and then they can load up their backpacks and just drink water and relax.

 And so that’s what started the conversation, “Say, you guys need water?”

 A lot of gaining the trust of somebody is to convince them, honestly, that you're not trying to exploit them.

You have to just make that clear, you know. You have to tell them, “I'm here to get your story out.” So with these Venezuelans, it's like, there are a lot of people where I come from in Chicago who don't like the Venezuelans who are coming, and they feel like they're freeloaders and they're just consuming resources.

 And so, you know, what I'm here to do is to show people what your story is and to get your human voice into the story. I want to hear everything about what drove you out of Venezuela and what you're experiencing on the journey and what you're hoping for when you arrive someplace in the United States.

 And my purpose here is to get your point of view into the story and to make it as powerful as possible.

It doesn't take long to say that. You can say that in probably three minutes, two minutes. And people tend to believe you when they hear that. That's how you can, right off the bat, gain credit, and establish some trust.

MV: Do you find it hard bridging that gap with your interview subjects while also keeping that journalistic distance or journalistic objectivity?

CM: If you're interviewing people who are really downtrodden and who have been exploited and abused and left out and marginalized, I don't think it's so important to have distance or objectivity. I don't, I just don't find it to be a paramount, like a virtue of the reporting is to be distanced.

 I think [the distance is] more important, really important, when you're interviewing people who have power. Business owners and people [who] have power in organizations are the ones that you have to be careful about your distance.

 But when you're interviewing migrants or people who live in really poor neighborhoods, you don't have to worry about it. I don't think even that people expect you to have a lot of the distance, the problem is closing the distance, not keeping the distance.

 But with the Venezuelan migrants, I wasn't expecting to have trouble talking with them. And I didn't.

MV: What is the importance of reporting that focuses on humanizing the subjects, that focuses on the people?

CM: We’ll just say the new president [Donald Trump] is promising the largest domestic, this is his language, the largest domestic deportation operation in U.S. history. Domestic, he's not talking about the border, he's talking about the interior of the country. That was a pillar of his campaign.

That's part of the context. I was thinking more about [what] Chicago can learn because we have tens of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the city and they're being treated like this giant imposition and [that] we don't have the resources when we actually have tons of resources in the city. A lot of resources.

That's the main context. Trumpism has been afoot for a long time. He was rising and ascending in the polls last spring. When we took this trip he was running on unleashing the largest domestic deportation operation in U.S. history.

The Venezuelans with temporary protective status the Biden administration has set up, they're very vulnerable, maybe one of the most vulnerable groups.

 So yeah, I don't mind humanizing them at all. The reporting that we did, every section is on a human story. We designed it that way.

 I designed the trip that way. And even though when I left, I didn't know exactly what the content would be. I knew that I wanted to document the Venezuelan experience. The whole way from what drove them out, to what they experienced crossing borders, to their reception in the receiving country, their hopes for the future.

If you do that, and if you can tell a compelling story with their humanity centered, that can be powerful. I hope.

We have a problem with atomized media now where a lot of people are consuming in echo chambers and they're closed off to the humanity of the victims. I worry about that. But the goal is to convey their humanity to as wide an audience as possible.

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Mitchell and WBEZ reporter Adriana Cardona-Maguigad are now reporting on Venezuelan families settled in Chicago with Temporary Protected Status granted by the Biden administration. A decision by President Trump to strip hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans of that status leaves many in danger of deportation. Mitchell and Cardona-Maguigad are following the families as their stories unfold.