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After immigration authorities targeted agricultural laborers in a surprise raid in California’s Kern county this year, fear-induced rumors circulated in communities around the state.
In San Francisco, a middle school student mistakenly reported seeing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agent board a transit bus, prompting the city’s school board to broadcast – and later retract – a warning to parents. In Oakland, an attorney published a post on Instagram alleging raids were occurring around the Bay Area. And in the Central valley, a medical clinic serving migrant farm workers saw patient numbers drop after rumors claimed Ice agents were targeting its patients.
The events are part of a broader trend in which mounting anxieties about mass deportations under a second Trump administration are spawning potentially dangerous falsehoods about sweeps and mass arrests. And to stoke fears even further, the administration is spreading its own rumors about sweeps to make the threat appear more immediate and widespread.
In response, hyper-local non-profit newsrooms around California are acting as vanguards against misinformation, filling an important gap as falsehoods proliferate on social media and sow distrust in mainstream news sources. They are developing toolkits, publishing resource guides, and training readers in media literacy. And with expansive networks in their communities, these journalists are fostering a level of trust that enables them to connect and resonate with readers who can be hard to reach.
“Panic works to the benefit of Ice,” said Junyao Yang, a reporter with Mission Local, an outlet serving San Francisco’s Mission District, one of the city’s most historic and diverse neighborhoods. “We have a responsibility to our neighbors who are immigrants in the Mission to tell them things they need to know.”
In the days that followed the Kern county sweeps, Gisselle Medina, a journalist at the publication Fresnoland, was startled by the quantity and specificity of misinformation they saw on social media, including warnings that border patrol agents were monitoring major downtown intersections and claims that Ice agents were descending on a popular mall.
But when Medina did some factchecking – contacting local non-profits, calling watch networks, and scanning law enforcement Facebook pages – they were unable to verify the claims. “No one knew what was happening,” Medina said. “Community members here in Fresno specifically were just very terrified.”
So Medina used the Fresnoland platform to get ahead of the noise and create an accessible resource that immigrant readers and community members could go to for answers. They drafted an article that outlined what had happened in neighboring Kern county in the days before, including information about the people arrested and agencies involved, as well as notes on the details that remained fuzzy. Then, Medina listed the contact information for local immigrant services organizations and laid out steps for immigrants to take in the event of an encounter with immigration enforcement, such as not carrying documentation about their immigration status on their person.
“I wanted to create a one-stop shop for people to reference and go back to over the next four years and beyond,” Medina said.
Mission Local’s Yang had a similar idea when she published a story on 17 January headlined “PSA: What immigrants should know in the time of Trump”. An explicit response to the impending inauguration, the piece offered readers phone numbers to call for legal assistance or to report Ice activities, explained that immigrants are not legally required to disclose their legal status to law enforcement, and provided a link for readers to download and print their own red card, a brightly colored piece of paper developed by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center that invokes immigrants’ constitutional rights.
The response was positive, Yang said, and the impact validating. “It was very powerful to see how you have this direct connection with your readers,” she said.
Employing the tools of service journalism – from publishing how-to guides to coordinating media training sessions – to combat misinformation is something California’s local non-profit news organizations have been leaning into for years.
Since 2021, El Tímpano, a Spanish- and Mam/Mayan-language media organization in the Bay Area, has facilitated disinformation defense workshops that teach community members how to identify and dispel falsehoods. And in the lead-up to last year’s elections, Cityside, a non-profit online media organization serving the San Francisco area’s East Bay, published a tool to help readers decode political mailers and hosted information sessions for local high schoolers voting in school board elections for the first time, while the staff at Mission Local delivered printed copies of their normally online-only reporting in Spanish and Chinese to monolingual pockets of the city. (The Guardian US has partnered with Mission Local, and the Guardian US’s managing director previously advised the launch of Cityside.)
And the demand for local journalists’ resources and expertise is only growing, newsroom leaders say. “We’ve had more requests than ever since the election from community partners asking us to bring our workshop to them,” said El Tímpano’s founding director, Madeleine Bair.
Cityside’s community journalism director, Jacob Simas, says the shift represents a broader transition in how the obligations of local newsrooms to their surrounding communities are understood. “We need to see ourselves as service providers,” Simas said. “We’re providing what we think is a really critical service to our communities, which is trustworthy, credible reporting and information resources that people can actually use to better their lives.”
Doing that work well involves nurturing deep ties with local residents and organizations – both so that local journalists can quickly and dependably verify truths or debunk falsehoods, and so that community members see local newsrooms as trusted messengers.
“We have lived here, we have families here, we come from the communities that are being targeted,” said Alma Martinez, executive director of the Central Valley Journalism Collaborative (CVJC), which operates and funds community news initiatives around the state. “That builds trust. That’s the secret sauce.”
And it requires putting the fight against misinformation front and center, she added.
“Even news organizations can get duped. We have to lead by example and make sure we’re providing news that is truthful, that’s objective, and that gets to the heart of what is happening.”
