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…