Several people at The New York Times Student Journalism Institute this week chose to report on stories dealing with the border.
Regina García Cano, a junior at Kent State University, is one of the lucky few who got through.
García Cano was doing a story on the delays experienced by trucks delivering fresh produce to the United States from Mexico. She wanted to talk to Brian Levin, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection in Tucson. After working feverishly to track him down, she got an interview on Monday morning, the day of her deadline.
Levin told her that he had to check with Washington to get the interview approved, since it was for The New York Times, which has international reach. Normally it’s rare to get an interview approved with Washington over the weekend, Levin said, but he managed it.
“He was very helpful and answered all of our questions,” García Cano said.
Others weren’t so lucky.
The U.S. Border Patrol decided to stop cooperating when several of the Institute journalists requested information. Which, of course, made it difficult to do the kind of thorough reporting expected of Institute participants.
Don Hecker, the Institute’s director, was taken aback.
The Border Patrol’s public information officers were treating the journalists as “students,” said Don Hecker, the Institute’s director. But he made clear to them that we were actually working more as “stringers,” or freelance journalists, for The New York Times, and that for the duration of the Institute we should be treated the same way any Times journalist would be.
But that’s not how it turned out.
Dalina Castellanos, a recent graduate of the University of Arizona, was working on a story about Operation Streamline, a federal law enforcement program that tries to expedite the processing of immigrants arrested for illegally crossing the border.
Castellanos said she didn’t get much help from the Border Patrol when she started calling.
“Everybody kept directing me to someone else,” Castellanos said.
One of her sources for the story, Raymond Kondo, assistant chief deputy U.S. marshal, provided Castellanos the number of Jeff Kalitan, the Border Patrol’s chief of operations for the Tucson sector. But when Castellanos called Kalitan, he told her he would have to check with his bosses in Washington before he could speak with her.
“It’s frustrating because they’re the ones that started the program and they won’t even comment,” Castellanos said.
In the end, the Border Patrol responded to her questions — but not until after the newspaper went to press.
Earlier in the Institute, Hecker made a few calls to see why the Institute’s participants were having problems getting information.
He spoke to a Border Control spokesman, Mario Escalante, and thought that after a long conversation they had reached an understanding.
“For simple statistical questions and routine types of questions he would provide answers without any further checks with Washington or anything like that,” Hecker said. “If we wanted to do anything like a ride-along or be admitted into some of the federal facilities,” Hecker added, Escalante said he “might need to require further information from us and there might be delays.”
A day after Hecker’s call, Luciana Morales, a junior at the University of Texas at Brownsville, called an agency spokeswoman for the Tucson sector, Colleen Agle, asking for figures on the number of bodies of illegal immigrants the sector had recovered in 2009, and the number of illegal immigrants the sector had arrested that year.
Agle gave what was becoming a familiar response: She couldn’t provide that information without first checking with superiors in Washington.
Which was strange, because just a few days earlier, yet another Border Patrol spokesman, David Jimarez, had provided those exact figures to another Institute participant for a separate story.
The numbers, by the way, were 208 dead and 241,673 apprehended in 2009.
Matt Lewis