The Empire Strikes Back at Press Freedom...reporters challenge ICE tactics... by Bill Conroy
molly...@gmail.com
A free press isn’t guaranteed absent struggle — often in darkness and against the odds
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, recently announced that it has adopted a policy that creates some internal checks and balances to prevent improper demands being placed on journalists to produce records or the identity of sources.
The new ICE media policy is a long time coming, however.
It’s far from perfect, but I consider it a battle won in my case — which has its roots in the drug and terrorism wars as they existed in the early 2000s during the George W. Bush administration. That’s when my stories for an online news site called Narco News caught the attention of ICE leadership and led to federal agents interrogating me in an effort to get me to cough up my story sources.
The new media policy adopted by ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), came only after Congress forced the agency’s hand via requirements included in the 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act. ICE complied officially in late June of this year, more than two years after the agency during the Trump administration issued an administrative subpoena to BuzzFeed News on Dec. 1, 2020.
That subpoena demanded that BuzzFeed identify news sources related to an Oct. 7, 2020, story involving a leaked ICE memo and related e-mail correspondence. After BuzzFeed wrote about the strong-arm tactics being used by ICE, the agency on Dec. 9, 2020, backed off and said it would not enforce the subpoena.
The Department of Justice in July of last year also beefed up its policy related to questioning journalists. The new DOJ policy is even more expansive than the ICE policy and creates a near-blanket prohibition on seeking information from journalists or demanding disclosure of their sources, with very narrow exceptions.
The roots of this battle for press rights, however, are deep, and mostly hidden — because the attacks are often honed first on many smaller, independent news organizations, like the nonprofit Narco News, which did not have the platform reach or budget of much larger media players like BuzzFeed.
We have to go back in time to get a glimpse of some of that hidden history. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press issued a report nearly two decades ago — in September 2005 — titled: Homefront Confidential: How the War on Terrorism Affects Access to Information and the Public’s Right to Know.
Following is a passage from that report.
In June 2005, the Reporters Committee wrote [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff urging him to adopt guidelines restricting how agents seek to obtain information from journalists, similar to regulations that have been in place at the Department of Justice for more than three decades.
The letter was sent after a leaked memo from the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security sparked its officials to visit the home and workplace of Bill Conroy [yes, that’s me] in an attempt to discover his source for an article on the online news service Narco News.
ICE Agents at My DoorFor more than five decades now, the drug war has fed on human vices as old as empires. I know its toll in misery, victims and death firsthand. I covered it as a journalist for decades for print and online publications, including where that war is most unforgiving — along the U.S.-Mexico border.
One story I dove deep into, in particular, also wreaked havoc in my personal life for a time. The case I was investigating eventually became known as the House of Death — the all-too true tale of a grisly crime involving a dozen individuals murdered, most tortured first. Their mutilated bodies were later found buried and sprinkled with lime in a mass grave in the backyard of an inconspicuous house in Juarez, Mexico — located just across the border from El Paso, Texas.
Participating in that murder spree and overseeing the House of Death itself was a U.S.-government informant, paid more than $220,000 for his work. That informant, who also was a rising leader in the Juarez Cartel, operated with the knowledge of and approvals from the ICE agents and federal prosecutors overseeing the cases he was working for them, including the House of Death case.
In the end, the Latino DEA supervisor who exposed it all, then-special agent in charge in El Paso, Sandalio Gonzalez, faced retaliation and was silenced by his superiors; deportation proceedings were initiated against the informant, setting him up to be murdered by the Mexican cartel he betrayed; and the entire bloody affair was whitewashed away in a conspiracy of self-interest that reached to the highest levels of the U.S. government during the administration of President George W. Bush.
I chronicled it all in a rolling series of reports, dispatches really, over 10 years as a correspondent for the nonprofit, online publication Narco News, which has since ceased publication.
It turned out to be a journalistic investigation that revealed in bloody detail how the moral and ethical decay among leadership and systems across both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border set the stage for the gruesome “House of Death” mass murder in 2004 — and the subsequent efforts by U.S. officials at DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to sweep it all under the rug. My dispatches at the time were a real-time tale of corrupted power’s devaluing of human life, callous ambition and racism juxtaposed against the heroism of those seeking to expose that injustice — all playing out in the tragic pretense of what is really a “war for drugs” along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The fallout from my House of Death reporting first came to my door in the spring of 2005, shortly after I had published a particularly damning set of stories in my investigative series on the mass murder case.
READ THE FULL STORY ONLINE AT MEDIUM:
https://wkc6428.medium.com/the-empire-strikes-back-at-press-freedom-7e41aa7253e7