News leader Maritza Félix on covering immigration in Arizona

Since President Donald Trump’s return to office, immigration enforcement in the United States has accelerated sharply, creating new and serious obstacles for journalists covering these policy impacts on local communities. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the use of immigration authorities to target reporters, including journalists who were in the country legally at the time of their detention — such as Mario Guevara and Estefany Rodríguez — as part of a broader pattern that creates a chilling effect on press freedom. 

This threat extends beyond enforcement on the ground: The Trump administration has proposed shortening the length of I visas — the visa used by foreign journalists to work in the United States — a move that CPJ has warned would create a framework for editorial censorship by tying press access to administration approval. With the 2026 FIFA World Cup bringing thousands of FIFA accredited journalists and media workers to the U.S., CPJ has urged reporters traveling to cover the games to be aware that press credentials will not protect them from potential stops, searches, and general harassment from law enforcement officials, including at the border. 

Reporters serving Spanish-speaking and immigrant communities like Maritza Félix, founder of the independent nonprofit news outlet Conecta Arizona, frequently face scrutiny as journalists covering the story and as individuals with deep personal ties to the communities they’re covering.  

Félix spoke with CPJ about her mission to inform and empower Hispanic, migrant, and border communities in Arizona, the risks facing journalists in her community, and how local newsrooms are adapting to a political environment that is increasingly hostile to the press. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What have been the biggest challenges in covering immigration in your community amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown?

Internally, we’re leading a team on which everyone has a different immigration journey, while they’re covering immigration experiences in the United States. Everybody on my team is authorized to work in the United States. But when you’re covering immigration and you’re not a US citizen, sometimes that makes you vulnerable. These things are on our minds when we’re deciding our editorial priorities and coverage. 

Additionally, this administration is not just changing laws, it’s also changing policies and procedures, so there is a lot of room for misunderstanding and mis- and dis-information. Everything is changing so rapidly—immigration attorneys are not always up-to-date with the news of the day—which sometimes makes them reluctant to be interviewed. 

And the communities we cover are not acting as they were before with the political climate that we’re living in. They know that every time that they go out, every time that they show their faces in public, every time that they do something, they can put them or their families at risk. 

Remember, Arizona is a border state, so the way that we live immigration has been different from other states. Because we do share a border, and we share families, and we share ties, and people go back and forth to work, for school, to the doctor. It’s a different kind of interaction with immigration authorities than the ones that you will have in other parts of the country. 

We also have a history of covering concerns about immigration [that predate the current administration]. In 2010, with SB 1070*, we started raising concerns about immigration and how to safely cover immigrant communities made especially vulnerable by the legislation. 

*Editor’s Note: SB 1070, signed into law in Arizona in 2010, requires state and local law enforcement agencies to check the immigration status of individuals it encounters and makes it a state crime to be without proper immigration documentation. 

What is your approach to covering the administration’s crackdown when so many of your reporters are affected, directly or indirectly, by its policies? 

Yes. Before, every time we were going to cross the border or drive to a checkpoint, or if we were covering a protest, the advice was something like, “Wear sunscreen and charge your phone.” Now we take many precautions. 

Getting access to information has become more difficult. We used to have more personal connections to law enforcement agencies like ICE and Border Patrol. Not anymore, now we have to email our questions. And the answers that they send are very “politically correct” [in line with the Trump administration’s policies]. They’re not giving us any more than what we request; sometimes we don’t hear back at all, and sometimes it can take weeks or months for them to get back to us. 

Read more about CPJ’s guidance on crossing the border.

Did your safety calculus change after Mario Guevara was detained? 

It did, and it didn’t. Protests against SB 1070 were like foreshadowing of the current immigration crackdown. The policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “America’s toughest sheriff,” prepared us for what we’re living through right now. It’s like having Arpaio on steroids in the White House. 

We’ve also been doing safety training. We’re trying to train not just the team at Conecta Arizona, but all the reporters in the local journalism ecosystem from Flagstaff to Mexico. 

Editor’s Note: Arpaio served as Maricopa County Sheriff from 1993 to 2017. 

In your community, what would you say has been the most impactful story related to immigration? 

A lot of difficult conversations happened after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Because they were two U.S. citizens, we were forced as a society to have a conversation about excessive force around immigration enforcement. But for us, that was nothing new. We remember the case of a Mexican boy who was killed in Mexico by U.S. border patrol agents. 

The story of Good and Pretti’s killings, as well as other immigration actions, have prompted other conversations in the Latino community in Arizona, especially those who said they wanted more security, and now think what is happening here and across the country is too much. 

What is one thing you would like to see change in the discourse around covering immigration? Do you have any frustrations with the way immigration is being covered right now? 

I would like to see more stories humanizing the immigration experience. In September last year, we launched a project called Mosaicos. It shows close-ups of immigrant beauty from our communities in day-to-day life, like photo essays of taquerias, tattoo artists, barbers, and the ballet folklorico. It’s part of reclaiming the narrative and showing that not all immigration coverage should be about pain and suffering—it should be about beauty and success as well.  

This might seem like a niche issue with so many other things going on in the country right now. Why should people care about the safety of reporters and especially reporters serving Spanish-language communities? 

Someone told me, “I didn’t cross the border, the borders crossed me,” and that has become a mantra for a lot of the civic engagement we have seen in Arizona. Immigration coverage is important because it’s affecting our neighbors, it is affecting our families, and affecting our country.  We’re part of this community. We’re part of this country. We’re not going anywhere. 

It’s important not to forget about the Mario Guevaras and the Estefany Rodriguezes—they were the firsts, but I’m pretty sure they’re not going to be the last ones who face consequences for their coverage of immigration.

Hear more from Félix in conversation with Jose Zamora, CPJ Americas Director, and Maria Hinojosa on Latino USA here.