Brittny Mejia, LA Times and Memo Torres, LA TACO

A recent Supreme Court ruling has opened the floodgates for "roving patrols" of federal agents to stop people on the street if they suspect they might be in the US illegally. If they're speaking a foreign language, if they happen to look like they are here illegally, they're fair game for possible detention. The roundups of immigrants by ICE and other agencies have caused turmoil, anguish, and uncertainty in many parts of Los Angeles.

From Downtown to Beverly Hills, from Reseda to the South Bay, communities and businesses have experienced raids by masked and armed agents, rounding up workers at car washes, home improvement stores, on streets in residential areas, and in front of construction sites. The impact can be felt as workers are too frightened to show up for work, and too frightened to risk sending their children to school.

Memo Torres and Brittny Mejia will discuss the challenges not only facing the communities and individuals at risk, but the challenges of reporting these stories.

Memo Torres is a journalist for LA TACO, an independent news platform dedicated to covering on-the-street reporting everything from, yes, the best tacos, to the current crisis in roundups by ICE. Torres is a multi-media journalist and is the host of the site's Daily Memo, and is a favorite journalist of MSNBC's Jacob Soboroff. His reporting covers stories long neglected by mainstream media.

Brittny Mejia is a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. Her coverage of ICE and Border Patrol roundups is relentless, and she was short-listed for a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for her work on healthcare in vulnerable communities. Mejia relentlessly covers the Latinx community in southern California, and has been named by CCNMA Latino Journalists of California as one of the most influential Latinas in California.

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