When Allan Marrero, an asylum-seeker from the Cayman Islands, was released after five months in immigration detention, there was only one journalist he invited to his celebration: Eileen Grench, a reporter with the independent, non-profit news outlet Documented.

Grench had previously reported on Marrero, who was detained after interviewing with federal officials for a marriage-based green card. But beyond covering his detention struggles, she humanized him, emphasizing his and his husband’s love story.

“Most folks in these situations aren’t just victims; they’re fighting and being resilient and maintain the beautiful things about their life, too,” said Grench.

The Marreros’ trust in Grench and Documented resulted in full access and rich reporting that received much attention; even NYC’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, tweeted Grench’s story upon Allan’s release. “To see their story kind of lifted up on to that city stage was really gratifying,” Grench said.

Documented is one of many immigrant-serving news outlets across the US meeting the moment when many legacy and mainstream publications are not, whether due to layoffs, lack of resources or being out of touch with immigrant communities. These independent local news organizations are using social media, chat apps and other nontraditional methods to connect directly with immigrants and non-English speakers – especially during recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surges – and they are leaving an impression.

“The impacts are phenomenal for relatively new media outlets, and part of it is because they’re operating on such a hyper-local level,” said Angie Chuang, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Immigrant communities know what they need. They might not be able to access it or make it happen, but they can articulate their own needs. What these outlets are doing is just understanding how amplifying the community’s voices can help them.”

Reaching immigrants on WhatsApp

Last year, Documented and the Spanish-language news service Conecta Arizona launched the Immigrant News Coalition (INC) with the Listening Post Collective, the Bay Area’s El Tímpano, and the Minneapolis-based Sahan Journal to share strategies and resources for serving immigrant communities – and to ensure their outlets’ survival. Their work has since been bolstered by a $1.5m award from the Press Forward Foundation to “test and spread effective revenue models for immigrant-serving newsrooms” and additional funding from Democracy Fund.

Through listening tours and research, the outlets have found that members of immigrant communities in the US don’t always read the news by visiting websites and reading push notifications, especially when English is not their first language. Instead, they rely on other platforms that may have inaccurate information, such as WhatsApp, which over half of Latinos in the US use.

To meet specific immigrant communities where they are, Documented runs a WhatsApp group in Spanish, a WeChat group for Chinese immigrants, and a TikTok account in Haitian Creole to combat misinformation about ICE raids and fear-based scams.

“Misinformation thrives when there is a vacuum of good information, and immigrant communities are so vulnerable because of the lack of alternatives,” said Madeleine Bair, the founder of El Tímpano. “We’re not translating news into other languages. We’re creating news first and foremost for immigrant communities, and that looks very different than news created for non-immigrant communities.”

Adapting to the moment

Emmy-winning journalist Maritza Félix started Conecta Arizona’s WhatsApp group, La Hora del Cafecito (Coffee Time), during the pandemic to provide timely, accurate news for immigrant communities in Spanish. The online gathering space, which has thousands of members across platforms, has a weekly Q&A with expert guests, including immigration attorneys, education policy experts and labor rights specialists.

But as ICE raids continue, members are engaging less in the public group chat and more in one-on-one direct messages with the staff.

“They’re afraid of being a screenshot, or having their message forwarded to someone,” Félix said. “Listening to our community taught us that what works today might not work next week. We are listening to what they say and their silences at the same time.”

Having a dialogue with the local Bay Area immigrant community has been crucial for El Tímpano, which is Spanish for “eardrum”. In addition to SMS messaging that reaches more than 7,000 Spanish-speaking immigrants, the outlet’s disinformation defense initiative, Comunidades Informadas, has trained more than 400 Latino immigrants in the Bay Area to recognize and address disinformation and misinformation.

“By equipping immigrants with an understanding of how disinformation works, it can empower them, so that when they see a rumor of an ICE raid, their immediate response isn’t to panic,” Bair said. “Instead, they can check with a source they trust or call their local rapid response hotline. We’ve received really positive responses to these workshops and to the information that we provide to combat that fear.”

In May, the Alameda county library partnered with El Tímpano for a disinformation defense initiative workshop in Spanish via Zoom for its staff members. Attenders found the content easy to understand, and it helped them articulate how to identify disinformation not just to community members, but also to their own family members.

“After going through the workshop, I was like, ‘I can talk to this with my tia and my tios, and explain it to them in the way that I didn’t really have the language before,’” said Jaqueline Martinez, the Alameda county library’s equity services coordinator.

Building trust within immigrant communities

For many of these outlets, the work and impact started before the recent ICE surge. In 2019, Documented co-founders Mazin Sidahmed and Max Siegelbaum spoke with community organizations across New York that were concerned about workers’ wages being stolen. Joined later by reporter Lam Thuy Vo, they launched an investigation, seeking out New York state and federal wage data for four years. The result was Documented’s Wage Theft Monitor, which inspired NY state legislators to introduce three bills to prevent and punish wage theft.

“The dual impact of protecting immigrant workers, but also helping the general public understand how pervasive this issue is, has been one of the most rewarding parts of seeing this project come to light,” Sidahmed said.

Similarly, LA Taco, which isn’t part of the INC, originally built trust among Los Angeles immigrant communities through its coverage of food, culture and cannabis. Then last June, as ICE raids swept through Los Angeles, LA Taco journalist Memo Torres began posting daily recaps of ICE activity on the publication’s Instagram account. By reporting verified information about raids during a time when misinformation ran rampant, Torres became one of LA’s most trusted journalists for immigrant communities, increasing LA Taco’s membership from 1,500 to 77,000 and earning attention from state and federal government officials.

“I was getting information from people, I started reaching out to rapid responders and building trust with them, and then got included in the network with them,” he said, recalling how he started the Daily Memo.

Over the summer, the Daily Memo wound down, while LA Taco’s political cartoons by Pulitzer prize finalist Ivan Ehlers, called Sunday Taquitos, took off. In July, his humorous yet poignant illustration about Flock camera surveillance received more than 7m Instagram views and inspired fan-created versions in five different languages. The Ecuadorian American artist said the political cartoons are his short-form way of fighting misinformation and disinformation.

“If I can get someone’s attention for five seconds, I can get people to look at important issues and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t know that was happening. Oh man, this is terrible,’” he said. “People will go in and do more research, read more about it, talk to their friends or share it, and that’ll start conversations.”

Ehlers has also served as creative director for one of LA Taco’s zines, showcasing the outlet’s reporting on local protests and immigrant communities. Its release in early September was just one of many in-person events LA Taco has held this year to engage with its readers.

“The bigger issue is building a community and building support systems and showing people that they’re not alone,” Ehlers said. “We have a lot of people who are willing to fight together, work together and build something together.”