Over the last two decades, Chicago has lost many crucial Spanish-language and ethnic news outlets. At the same time, the City of Chicago lacks a central information hub for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, which explains where they can access critical help in finding food, health care and legal assistance. News and critical information serving immigrant communities, which is 20% of our population, is scarce in Chicago despite the large number of news outlets operating here.
The reality is that when it comes to serving immigrants, Chicago is a news desert.
One-third of Chicagoans speak Spanish at home. But only one news outlet in the city publishes every story they report in English and Spanish. And that’s Borderless Magazine.
With the support of Chicagoans, we have grown from an all-volunteer project (90 Days, 90 Voices) to a thriving nonprofit news organization in just a few short years. For our community-centered reporting and engagement efforts, we were named the “Future of Local Journalism” at the 2024 national Next Challenge Awards. Our investigations into inhumane conditions at Chicago’s largest migrant shelters won regional and national awards and helped shut down the troubled city shelter system, saving taxpayers millions of dollars.
At the heart of Borderless’ success has been our commitment to meeting communities where they are at. We changed how newsrooms view in-person engagement work when we launched our field canvassing playbook in 2023. By hiring community members to distribute our stories in public places and connect with community members, we’ve been able to double our newsletter subscribers and help overcome our community’s mistrust of the media.
When President Trump was elected last year, we faced a new challenge in meeting our communities’ information needs. Just a month after the election, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, warned that mass deportations would “start right here in Chicago.” A chill fell over the city, with rumors swirling through social media of ICE raids and increased police actions. Some immigrants stopped going to work or their doctor appointments, while others kept their children home from school.
In this atmosphere, we adopted the slogan, “Facts, not fear.” (See our editor’s note.) We took our fact-based, bilingual reporting directly to the source of misinformation, social media, and launched a series of impactful vertical videos and carousels on Instagram and TikTok informing people of their rights.
Many news outlets across the city asked to republish our social products and accompanying web story, including Block Club Chicago, Cicero Independiente, the Triibe, South Side Weekly, and the Chicago Reader. Readers viewed our English and Spanish Instagram posts over 1 million times and shared it over ten thousand times. Homan later said that such Know Your Rights information access was “making it very difficult” to arrest people in Chicago.
