Research on one story led her to uncover a national breaking issue

In 2018, then New York Times reporter Catilin Dickerson began investigating a federal case out of Southern California involving a judge ordering the reunification of separated families at the Mexican American border. Through her investigation, she never would have imagined that it would lead her to uncover the youngest child separated by U.S. officials at the border.

Dickerson was a part of breaking a story that grabbed Americans’ attention and shined a light on the current immigration crisis occurring under the Trump administration. Children were being separated from their parents and parents were given little to no information about the whereabouts of their children.

“Each time there would be a hearing or a status update in a case I would go and read all the documents that were submitted by the lawyers who brought the case,” Dickerson said. “I saw a reference to a four-month-old child and it immediately stopped me in my tracks because it was the youngest kid that I had ever heard of.”

I have read Dickerson’s work before and know that she is very diligent in her reporting and always strives to capture the true essence of a story. That is what she did when telling the story of Baby Constantin, a four-month-old baby from Romania who was separated from his father at the border in Brownsville, TX.

I first came across Dickerson’s coverage on this story in an episode of the New York Times series, “The Weekly,” featured on the streaming service Hulu. The series aired in 2019 and highlighted one story a week looking at the journalist’s process of uncovering the pressing issue and taking the viewer on a journey through the entire investigative reporting process. The third episode told Dickerson’s story.

After watching the episode, I turned to read the written text piece. Between the episode and the written component, I learned a lot about what the Trump administration was doing.

Dickerson said that, at the time of the investigation, the Trump administration was working on an aggressive plan to stop people from crossing the border. After receiving backlash from the public for separating families the administration announced it would not be continuing the process of separating families. But Dickerson heard differently. She heard from a source that the White House was moving forward and had no true plans of stopping the separations.

“I had a hunch that it was the youngest kid separated because just logistically it’s just very hard to pull a child much younger than that from their parents,” she said.

The four-month-old baby was not identified by name in the documents, so Dickerson reached out to her network. This includes defense lawyers who help defend immigrants, immigrant advocates, and people who run shelters that house many immigrants which all kept their ears open for any information that could be helpful to her.

“It took many months to be able to figure out who the child was and where they were,” she said. “By the time I did, I was kind of able to slow down my reporting on the broader story because reunifications were happening and turn my focus to [the baby] Constantin’s story.”

Dickerson is a very well-respected journalist and has even been on a team of reporters who won a Peabody for their reporting. She explained that, once the Baby Constantin story started to develop, she did not formally pitch the idea to her editor. They already had a relationship built on trust where Dickerson almost had free range with her stories. But, she did stress the importance of pitching especially as a young journalist barely entering the industry.

“Being completely candid, once you really get into a rhythm as a reporter and you have a relationship with your editor and they trust you, the pitch process becomes less formal,” she said.

Once she honed more of her time specifically to Constantin and looked into his family, Dickerson was met with a lot of obstacles. One big obstacle was that she had a difficult time even communicating with his family for various reasons including a language barrier. A second big obstacle was that people were not willing to speak about the situation at all.

“I actually had to call one of my colleagues at the Times who was Romanian and she was in France at the time and she was translating for me at two in the morning to try and help me speak with Constantin’s parents to get permission to go and visit them,” she said.

Once she was able to make contact with the family she went through a long process of convincing them to trust her and speak about the experience they had endured. She explained that this was the biggest obstacle during her entire reporting process.

“For [Constantin’s parents], it was a big emotional hurdle,” she said. “They were very skeptical at first because they were still very traumatized from the experience.”

She also had to go through the same process with Constantin’s legal foster family. Due to different laws, the foster family is actually prohibited from speaking publicly about any of the cases of the children they are caring for. Dickerson had to seek permission from the government that would allow the family to speak with her. For the most part, most of the information, case documents, or other legal documents Dickerson used in her reporting were public records so she was not faced with a big obstacle in that sense.

I asked Dickerson what sort of techniques she used when she was interviewing these people. If there were any specific tactics she used to gain their trust and develop a level of communication. Her answer was simple, remember you are a human.

“I start by introducing myself as a person even before I introduced myself as a journalist,” she said.

The entire reporting process took about a year from start to finish primarily because Dickerson was working on a number of different projects at the same time. Even though she might have faced obstacles or challenges along the way, the part she enjoyed the most was the story she was able to tell.

“My favorite part of the story was to create this intimate portrait of a family,” she said. “This story was so big but because of that it was hard for people who were consuming the news to walk away with a specific image in their minds.”

The practices Dickerson used, the language in her piece, and the dedication to uncovering a story but still remembering to be empathetic are all things I strived for as an aspiring journalist. Her work is admirable and a great example of excellent storytelling.