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Part two of our two-part series with The Telegraph & Kenya’s Daily Nation
During the coronavirus outbreak, Kenya saw another uptick in the number of aborted fetuses and abandoned babies, according to service providers in direct contact with women on the ground. Kabale and Donovan wrote a second, follow-up story digging into the spike. The reasons were varied: schools closures leaving some 13 million students idle for seven months, restrictions on movement hindering access to contraceptives and reproductive health information, as well as global medical supply chains still causing knock-on delays and shortages of contraceptives for some clinics in Kenya.
They told the story through the experience of Ashura Mciteka, a health volunteer who was dealing with aborted fetuses after they’d been abandoned in her local area. After a community landlord read the story, he offered Ashura an office space for one year free of charge. Using this space, she has been able to hold one-day trainings about the dangers of unsafe abortions with pregnant girls.
When COVID-19 first shuttered schools in Washington, DC, and around the country, Fuller Project Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Xanthe Scharff immediately penned an OpEd in TIME noting that the pandemic would quickly become a gender and equity issue, and focusing on the impact of the most vulnerable women workers. The piece forecasted that job losses would be disproportionately shouldered by women and that women with jobs in industries with poor workplace protections would be doubly impacted. With widespread and lengthy school closures looming, a majority of mothers would be forced to miss work, as they are ten times more likely than men to stay home with children. Single working parents, who are four times more likely to be women than men in the United States, would struggle to keep their jobs. The piece also underscored the heightened strain on those without a social support system and how the increase in economic hardships could make women more susceptible to domestic violence. This article drew important attention to the trends which have since defined the “Shecession.”
After this OpEd, Dr. Scharff and Fuller Project contributor Sarah Ryley followed with rigorous, data-backed reporting based on exclusive statistics from 17 states that showed women were the majority of unemployment seekers. The analysis showed that federal data would not reveal this trend for another month – precious time while trillions of dollars of pandemic aid were being legislated.
Dr. Scharff and Ryley provided individual and group briefings on the data to dozens of reporters the Wednesday evening before the Jobs Report release. As a result at least 12 news outlets, ranging from The New York Times to Iowa Watch, covered the story and cited the data. This widely published data underpinned a national conversation in April about the stark gender trends in unemployment three weeks ahead of a federal release of data that showed the same trend. Following the data requests, two states, New York and Oregon, began to release weekly unemployment statistics disaggregated by gender. Building on this investigation, Ryley analyzed the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May employment report, finding that women lost 11.7 million nonfarm payroll jobs compared to an estimated 9.6 million for men. Dr. Scharff and Susan Smith Richardson co-authored an OpEd in the Boston Globe calling for the U.S. government to address the shortcomings in federal data releases with regards to disaggregated information related to race and gender. Dr. Scharff has briefed over 80 policymakers, journalists and philanthropists on these findings to date.
Fuller Project reporter Jenna Krajeski profiled Dr. Lubab al-Quraishi, an Iraqi surgical pathologist and a refugee, who was helping the US in its COVID-19 response by administering tests to elderly residents in nursing homes in Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn. When the lab director at the pathology lab where she works asked for volunteers, she was the first to step up, despite the risk of infection. “We are from Baghdad, we know how to handle difficult situations,” she told Krajeski.
Following our reporting, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called Dr. Al-Quraishi directly to thank her for her service and pledged to help extend her temporary medical license. Advocacy groups cited the reporting as having raised awareness about licensure barriers. Al-Quraishi has been invited to speak on the issue, and she penned an open letter to then-incoming President Biden asking him to help refugee medical professionals practice in their fields of expertise.
For Marie Claire Magazine, Fuller Project contributor Colleen Hagerty reported on homeless and housing insecure moms struggling to find safe places to shelter their families during the coronavirus crisis.
Hagerty featured a homeless mother, Martha Escudero, who along with her two daughters was looking for shelter in Los Angeles while advocating for abandoned properties to be used to house families.
Escudero is part of “Reclaiming Our Homes,” a group that demanded California Governor Gavin Newsom open up all vacant properties in the state for occupancy during the initial coronavirus outbreak. She called it “immoral” for so many houses to sit empty as thousands are on the streets during a public health crisis. “If the government’s not doing their job and finding solutions fast enough, then we need to take the steps and sometimes break their laws,” she said.
Following this reporting, activists successfully negotiated with the city to use vacant properties. Escudero and her two daughters moved into a blue bungalow in El Sereno, one of more than 100 vacant, state-owned properties in East Los Angeles. Since she and other “Reclaimers” have cultivated a community garden, a community maintenance team and community storage space, according to Reclaiming Our Homes.
In Rikha Sharma Rani’s profile of Bonnie Castillo, executive director of National Nurses United, the largest union of registered nurses in the country, she lays out how the union leader began raising the alarm about PPE shortages as early as January 2020, and how Castillo’s focus on health and safety — which had been criticized by some who wanted her to be more active in national politics — helped her see the crisis coming before most, including those in the federal government.
It took three weeks for Castillo to finally agree to be profiled. When she and Sharma Rani finally connected, they spoke for five hours over three separate Zoom calls. Sharma Rani also spoke with dozens of others seeking insight into Castillo’s life and work, including her daughter, her union colleagues, labor experts, and several of her critics (among them, former presidential candidate Ralph Nader). The result was an intimate look at one of the most significant and under-the-radar figures of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The nursing workforce is overwhelmingly female and more than a third of nurses are women of color. Castillo, the daughter of a railroad worker whose parents hail from Mexico, is the first person of color to head the union. In September 2020, she became a Time Magazine Person of the Year (a union representative told The Fuller Project our piece helped influence that decision). In her tribute to Castillo, Dolores Huerta, the legendary union leader, linked directly to this story and seemed to draw from its core thesis: that Castillo was among the first to draw attention to our looming national crisis.
The story was featured on The New York Times homepage as Castillo appeared before Congress to demand better PPE.
For Marie Claire Magazine, Fuller Project contributor Colleen Hagerty reported on homeless and housing insecure moms struggling to find safe places to shelter their families during the coronavirus crisis.
Hagerty featured a homeless mother, Martha Escudero, who along with her two daughters was looking for shelter in Los Angeles while advocating for abandoned properties to be used to house families.
Escudero is part of “Reclaiming Our Homes,” a group that demanded California Governor Gavin Newsom open up all vacant properties in the state for occupancy during the initial coronavirus outbreak. She called it “immoral” for so many houses to sit empty as thousands are on the streets during a public health crisis. “If the government’s not doing their job and finding solutions fast enough, then we need to take the steps and sometimes break their laws,” she said.
Following this reporting, activists successfully negotiated with the city to use vacant properties. Escudero and her two daughters moved into a blue bungalow in El Sereno, one of more than 100 vacant, state-owned properties in East Los Angeles. Since she and other “Reclaimers” have cultivated a community garden, a community maintenance team and community storage space, according to Reclaiming Our Homes.
Part one of our two-part series with The Telegraph & Kenya’s Daily Nation
The Fuller Project’s Louise Donovan and Nasibo Kabale, from Kenya’s Daily Nation, teamed up to investigate funding for contraception and family planning, and what it means for women in Kenya. Abortion is mostly illegal. For women and girls who struggle financially, contraception is expensive. In cases of unwanted pregnancies, or where they are unable to support a child, some women and girls either seek illegal, dangerous back-alley abortions without proper medical guidance, or give birth — often in secret — and dump the infant out of desperation.
It’s not a story any reporter wants to find, but good journalism looks at how policy truly affects women. In just one small stretch of the Nairobi river, a volunteer clean-up team found nine babies.
Both journalists spent months talking to young women, medical and health officials and government workers to understand the problem. More than half of girls between 15-19 who want contraception can’t get access to it. Meanwhile the U.S. dramatically reduced funding for maternal health and family planning in Kenya under President Trump’s administration, from $41 million in 2017 to $8.8 million just one year later causing devastation for Kenyan women and girls.
After the first story published in 2019, Esther Passaris, a Nairobi politician, contacted the volunteer clean-up team featured in the story who were finding abandoned fetuses in the river. As a result, in early 2020, the team said they received $10,000 in funding through the National Government Affirmative Action Fund (NGAAF) which they used to continue to rejuvenate the area, including building pathways, gardens and a playground for children. According to Christoper Wairimu, the group’s secretary, this was directly related to the story. Passaris read it and wanted to help.
The story had over 130K unique readers, above average for the Telegraph pre-pandemic, and it was also nominated for the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics.
For The New York Times, Fuller Project Global Editor Sophia Jones profiled Ingrid Brown, one of 3.5 million truck drivers — 200,000 of whom are women — working to keep the U.S. well-stocked and well-fed during the pandemic. Brown, a 58-year-old outspoken trucking advocate, cancer survivor and grandmother of six, was among the essential workers who make up the backbone of a hugely important, yet troubled, industry. Nearly all of America’s produce, goods and equipment are transported by truck.
In the early months of the pandemic, Brown was driving largely without protective equipment. She couldn’t easily find masks or disinfectant supplies to wipe down her truck. While some large trucking companies provided supplies to their personnel, many truckers were left to protect themselves. On the road, meals and supplies were more difficult to come by. Many restaurants were closed. Truck stops were running out of certain goods, and truckers couldn’t easily pull into parking lots — like at a Target, or a Walmart — to buy essentials if there wasn’t a designated truck parking space. Even if they could, Brown says, coveted items — like Clorox wipes — were mostly out of stock.
The profile generated response from readers and manufacturing companies who wanted to help. When readers reached out, Jones connected them with the nonprofit Women in Trucking, which helped coordinate donations of masks and hand sanitizer across dozens of states.
Our story led The New York Times homepage with reporting about the barriers faced by families who are not fluent in English. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many families relied on their children to translate for them in order to better understand the education system. The shift to online schooling has exacerbated challenges for immigrants and their families.
The genesis for this piece was a conversation Fuller Project reporter Rikha Sharma Rani had with her editor, who told her about an Iraqi immigrant family — a friend of a friend — struggling to homeschool in the wake of COVID-19-related school shutdowns. The parents in the family didn’t speak English, so their college-aged daughter was helping to homeschool their elementary school-aged son while managing her own college course load.
The anecdote sparked the question: What are parents and students who don’t speak English doing right now? For Sharma Rani, the question had personal resonance: At the time, she was struggling to homeschool her own two daughters and couldn’t imagine how much harder that job would be for parents who weren’t fluent in English.
With no teachers physically present to help guide students in many states, caregivers were being forced to take a more active role than ever before in their children’s education. But parents who weren’t proficient in English couldn’t easily navigate Google Classroom, daily schedules, or homework instructions. For many, those challenges were compounded by lack of an adequate Wi-Fi connection or a computer. And because of language barriers, they couldn’t effectively communicate these challenges to teachers and school officials.
Reporting the story meant identifying and interviewing people who weren’t fluent in English, using translators who could speak Spanish and Arabic. To ask follow-up questions — of which there were many, in order to get the necessary detail and color for the piece — Sharma Rani used Google Translate, giving her a real-time glimpse into the communications challenges faced by her sources, who relied heavily on the tool in order to support their children’s learning.
The resulting piece, published in April 2020 in The New York Times, was one of the first looks at how immigrant and non-English speaking families were coping during the pandemic. It was featured as a “Lesson of the Day” in the Times’ learning network, and sparked online discussion among students who recognized their own situations in the reporting. It was included in several education-related newsletters, including Education Week and Washington Monthly’s “Best of the Week” education newsletter. It was also republished in The Chicago Tribune and shared on Twitter by Congresswoman Barbara Lee. After publication, we received emails from educators and readers wanting to support non-English speaking families by serving as translators or by providing technical solutions, and we directed them to nonprofits and school districts working on the issue. At the time of publication, there were few (if any) pieces exploring the impact of the pandemic on immigrant communities. This story revealed the distinct hurdles they faced, and the ways in which school districts were addressing — or not addressing — these challenges. This reporting also won a crisis coverage award from The American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Fuller Project contributing editor Rikha Sharma Rani partnered with Wisconsin Watch’s Parker Schorr to publish a series about limitations on reproductive healthcare in Catholic hospitals in Wisconsin and their impact on women, particularly Black women and women of color. The series, published by Wisconsin Watch and The Cap Times and picked up by The Washington Post, spotlighted Wisconsin’s heavy reliance on Catholic healthcare. Catholic hospitals are subject to regulations imposed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that limit access to some reproductive procedures — abortion, contraceptive care, in vitro fertilization and tubal ligation, for example. Black people in low-income neighborhoods are disproportionately affected by these limitations.
The Fuller Project and Wisconsin Watch jointly purchased data from the Wisconsin Hospital Association to identify which services were being provided by individual hospitals in Wisconsin. Analysis of the data confirmed that Catholic hospitals were by and large not providing long-lasting reversible contraception, for example, but that practices varied widely even among Catholic hospitals subject to the same rules. In some cases, Sharma Rani and Schorr found that Catholic hospitals were using workarounds to provide services that were otherwise restricted. One hospital, for instance, was providing tubal ligations at a nearby eye clinic.
The investigation also found that, in some parts of the state, the only nearby hospital was Catholic and that many women were unaware that their local hospital was Catholic or that access to certain reproductive procedures was effectively blocked. In certain situations, such as if a woman had pregnancy complications, this was putting women’s health at risk. The collaboration drew on Schorr’s intimate knowledge of the health landscape in Wisconsin and Sharma Rani’s extensive reporting on reproductive health, resulting in a fair-minded, deeply reported look at the intersection between religion and women’s health (a representative of the Catholic Church told Sharma Rani that he believed the reporting was balanced).
Wisconsin Watch said that the collaboration brought attention to the issue of lack of choice and access to secular reproductive care for women, especially women of color, in the state. The reporting won the Milwaukee Press Club Silver Award for Best Consumer Story.
In June 2020, Fuller Project reporter Louise Donovan started speaking to domestic workers in Saudi Arabia on WhatsApp who had been fired due to their employers’ fears of the coronavirus pandemic – and were then being held against their will by the very employment companies that had brought them there. A source connected her to a number of these workers: Apisaki, from Kenya, was locked in a single room with eight women. One was pregnant. One was chained to the wall. Some had been there since March with little food or sunlight. The resulting story, published in partnership with The New York Times, chronicles the horror of domestic workers across the Middle East being held in increasingly dire and dangerous conditions.
Apisaki sent Donovan graphic pictures and videos via WhatsApp of the living conditions inside the locked room. One woman was naked and chained to the wall by her arm. She was both physically and mentally unwell. As Apisaki was the only woman in the room who could speak fluent English and was able to access the internet via data (paid for by her partner), she risked her life by talking to a journalist. It wouldn’t have been difficult for the recruitment agency to figure out who had the tools to communicate with an outsider.
Another reporting challenge was whether to name Apisaki or the recruitment agency in Saudi Arabia for maximum impact. She and the eight other women were not only in immediate danger, but also in an unpredictable situation beyond their control. We didn’t want the story to make their situation worse, or put the women’s lives in further danger – especially as they were still under being held against their will by the recruitment agency at the time of publishing.
We carefully considered the best – and most cautious – way to report this piece, weighing the most impactful storytelling while ensuring the women were safe.
Ultimately, we decided to print the name of the recruitment agency in Saudi Arabia but refer to Apisaki by her middle name. Without directly outing the owner of the agency, the recruitment agent could deny or simply ignore the allegations, and the women would remain locked inside the room.
The final decision involved delicately balancing our ethical obligation to the women who bravely spoke up and told her their story, particularly Apisaki, and the story’s potential for real-world impact. This included keeping Apisaki up-to-date and informed during the reporting process to ensure she wasn’t surprised in any way.
The impact was evident before the story was even published. While we were still reporting, we contacted the recruitment agency in Saudi Arabia for comment, and the nine women were immediately moved by the agency owner from the locked single room into larger accommodation, given proper beds and three meals a day.
After the story was published, Saudi government officials raided the recruitment agency and moved the women to a safehouse. Several women were taken to the hospital for medical check-ups, including the woman who was six months pregnant. The Kenyan embassy in Riyadh contacted the women and ensured they were given back their passports and given the required COVID-19 tests to fly home.
Several members of the public reached out to help the pregnant Kenyan woman, Kelleh, who was stranded in Dubai. One facilitated her COVID-19 test and visa issues, while a second covered the cost of her flight. In July, Kelleh landed back in Nairobi. She has since given birth to her baby. After an initial delay, Apisaki also flew home to Nairobi in September.
The story was published on the front page of the international edition of The New York Times. It was shared widely on Twitter by journalists and experts in the Middle East and discussed on the BBC’s ‘The Papers’ segment.
Several of the women in the story told Donovan that this reporting – and its subsequent impact – saved their lives.
Fuller Project contributor Eileen Guo’s piece was one of the first that looked at pregnancy and childbirth during coronavirus through a health equity lens. This story refocused the conversation about childbirth during COVID-19 from just the experiences of primarily white, upper middle class mothers to look at how much worse it would be for mothers of color, and particularly Black mothers, who suffer the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S.
In addition, this story was the first to break two additional pieces of news on how COVID-19 was affecting childbirth: that at least one maternity ward in San Francisco was closing down and being converted to a COVID-19 ward, and that at least one hospital system was offering inductions at 39 weeks to get ahead of the expected COVID curve, the first known case of this happening — even before the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists gave any guidance on the matter.
The article has been cited in two academic papers, and was also cited in a letter to Senate majority and minority leaders from Senators Booker, Gillibrand, Harris and others, requesting that maternal health be included in a 2020 COVID stimulus package.
In December 2020, Congress approved funding for maternal mental health – historic funding as a part of the stimulus package.
During the summer of 2020, Fuller Project reporter Louise Donovan began looking into Lesotho’s garment industry as the coronavirus pandemic rapidly crushed the global supply chain, including in the small landlocked country in southern Africa, and upended livelihoods for millions of workers around the world.
J.C. Penney filed for bankruptcy and began closing over 150 stores across the U.S. around the same time. In speaking with several workers unions, Donovan learned that one garment factory in Lesotho had laid off staff specifically due to limited orders from J.C. Penney. While the collapse of the global garment industry during the pandemic had been reported on, no one had yet directly linked two women on each end of this crumbling supply chain: One in America, anxious about the impact of store closures, and another some 10,000 miles away, in Lesotho, with no income and living off church donations.
In a bid to understand how these two lives had been affected, Donovan began looking for sources. She spoke with 53-year-old Matefo Litali, a veteran seamstress, after a Lesotho-based workers union put them in touch. Her search for a former J.C. Penney employee proved tougher. Many women didn’t want to jeopardize their severance pay by talking to a journalist on-the-record. After trawling Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram with little success, she eventually switched to TikTok. Here she found videos uploaded by Alexandra Orozco, a 22-year-old freight team associate who was documenting – and, arguably, processing – the closure of her J.C. Penney store in Delano, California, online.
The authorities in Lesotho don’t compel garment factories to publish statistics on job cuts and many factory owners are not particularly forthcoming with this information. As the country is a lesser-known garment powerhouse compared to China or Bangladesh, there is simply less research conducted by labor rights organizations and groups. Donovan spent weeks collecting data from several workers’ unions and researchers to understand the depth of layoffs across the country’s some 50-plus garment factories.
When a big American retailer crumbles, such as J.C. Penney, the fallout across the globe is huge — and women are disproportionately impacted. Some 80% of J.C. Penney employees are female, according to the most recently available data from 2016. Women also make up the vast majority of garment workers around the world.
The Associated Press published the story, and it was picked up by more than 100 news outlets globally, including in Lesotho, and within the U.S., including The Washington Post and ABC, reaching an estimated 1.56 million readers. Readers also sent messages of support and encouragement to Alexandra, the former J.C. Penney employee in California.
Nearly three million Filipina women work abroad as migrant domestic workers, where they are paid low wages to clean homes, cook meals and care for comparatively wealthy families — under often exploitative conditions.
A year into a global pandemic, thousands were stranded with even fewer options to flee exploitation.
This story with the Guardian focused on Rowena, a 54-year-old Filipina domestic worker in Bahrain. She is one of more than a dozen Filipina women across Asia, Europe and the Middle East interviewed by Fuller Project reporter Corinne Redfern over nine months in 2020. Most of the women had lost jobs or had salaries cut by their employers during the pandemic. Others had found themselves subjected to physical abuse.
In April, Rowena’s boss said that due to the pandemic, he could no longer pay her monthly salary of $333. Instead, he said, he would provide her and the three other women he employed with $27 for food every two weeks, to be split between them. Rowena was due to leave Bahrain that month and return to the Philippines. But a few weeks later, her flight out of the country was canceled, and she found herself trapped. In September, her employer stopped giving the women their food allowance, leaving them with nothing. Rowena started working odd jobs around the neighborhood to earn enough money to eat.
In May, Rowena applied for a one-off sum of $208 in financial support from the Philippines Department of Labor and Employment. In early December, she received 75BHD ($204), seven months after she first applied for aid. She repeatedly told Redfern that she only wanted to go home, but the cheapest ticket from Manama to Manila costs more than twice as much as her aid check.
Redfern’s story was also featured in the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast. Dozens of readers and listeners asked how they could support Rowena, and many offered to pay for her flight home. The Philippine Embassy in Bahrain intervened, and helped Rowena leave her employer. Embassy staff moved Rowena and the other two women to the embassy, where they were given food and shelter until flights home could be arranged.
The Philippine Ambassador to Bahrain confirmed that they recovered unpaid wages from Rowena’s employer, and that our reporting “brought to light” Rowena’s circumstances and “paved the way” for the Embassy to intervene. Rowena was repatriated to the Philippines on March 5.
This TIME Labor Day edition cover story focused on the lives of waitresses at one diner in Philadelphia to highlight the broader inequities — exacerbated by gender — that exist across the service economy, particularly within the tipped workforce. About 11.4 million Americans now work in jobs in restaurants and bars, a 52% increase from two decades ago. Two-thirds of them are women, and 40% are people of color. Christina Munce, the main waitress featured, is a single mother on food stamps and Medicaid who was making the Pennsylvania minimum wage for tipped workers, which is just $2.83 per hour. She made most of her money on tips, which means that her daily income depends on how many people dine on that day or how generous some strangers are feeling. Sexual harassment is rampant and paid sick days are nonexistent in Munce’s world.
Drilling down on policy and labor data, Fuller Project reporter Malcolm Burnley and TIME reporter Alana Semuels showed why women continue to be paid so low in restaurants, and how that’s concerning for the future of the country. Service work, without guaranteed hours or income, is expected to grow in America over the next decade.
Burnley’s reporting ensured that working women’s voices were central in the national policy discussion about the economy. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, then-US Senator Claire McCaskill echoed our reporting; Senator Cory Booker followed with an OpEd in TIME Magazine, and our article was shared by PA Governor Tom Wolfe and reacted to by then-Presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Several of the waitresses at the featured diner received hundreds of dollars in unsolicited donations from readers. Waitress Christina Munce received donations of over $3,000 from sympathetic readers, and was offered and accepted a full-time job with benefits.
A secondary focus of the article was the patchwork of state laws covering tipped workers, which are rarely updated and disproportionately affect women and people of color. Since 1991, the federal minimum wage has doubled for most workers across the country. Meanwhile, tipped workers’ minimum wages have remained frozen at the same levels. In 2019 alone, 16 states as diverse as Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Indiana introduced legislation to raise the tipped minimum wage to the level of all other workers, responding to waitresses who’ve marched on state capitols and on Congress.
In the article, Burnley and Semuels quoted Jacob Vigdor, an economist at the University of Washington, who said that in the next recession, “the primary hit is going to generally be in sectors that don’t involve providing basic services to other people.” That has proven to be true with the service sector, and women have been disproportionately represented on unemployment rolls during the COVID-19 crisis.
The Fuller Project partnered with The Guardian to report on migrant women who were sent back to Mexico within days of giving birth and without an opportunity to collect birth certificates for their U.S. citizen newborns. They were “expelled” under a policy Trump officials put in place during the pandemic. Around 400,000 people were subject to the policy since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which also prevented them from appearing in front of a judge or from being screened for asylum claims. These expulsions were largely carried out away from the public eye and compounded the suffering caused by an existing web of exclusionary border policies
Our investigation found that at least 11 new mothers and their U.S. citizen newborns were subject to the policy our reporter Tanvi Misra found, based on conversations with lawyers, two of the moms, and a review of hospital records. Among them was ‘Helene’, a 23-year-old woman from Haiti who gave birth in Chula Vista, California, only to be dropped off on the side of the road along the San Diego-Tijuana border three days later — just 25 minutes after she was discharged from the hospital, she told Misra through a translator. Misra later described the conversation:
“Whenever I’m able to speak to folks who’ve made this kind of journey, there’s a lot of moments of the conversations that stick with me. I am not always able to put them all in the story. In this case, it was how the woman described her journey to the U.S. She said it was beautiful & terrible (translated). Beautiful because she met a lot of people — other migrants — who encouraged her and gave her strength. Terrible because of all the awful things that can happen — (she listed rape, kidnapping ) — the violence of it.”This story was published on February 4 during vital weeks for immigration policymaking. On February 24, President Biden repealed various Trump-era border policies. The Biden administration also started exempting unaccompanied minor children and certain vulnerable families from the Trump policy under which the mothers in this story were “expelled.”
The story had an almost immediate impact. In April 2021, a month after it was published, all the women in the story were granted humanitarian parole, which allowed them to enter into the United States and start the process of requesting asylum. That July, the story was cited in a lawsuit filed by immigrant groups, which demanded government records related to the treatment of pregnant women and their children in CBP’s custody. The same month, the Homeland Security Office of Inspector General released a report reviewing one of the births in our story and concluded that the CBP did not properly track births in custody or always promptly release U.S. citizen newborns. And finally, in August, CBP issued a memo allowing for the exemption of pregnant women and women who had just given birth from “Title 42.”
While there had been some high-level media and academic reports about child care center closures in California, this article was the first look at actual county-level child care provider closures during the early months of the pandemic. It revealed an astonishing scale of closures in a state already deemed a “child care desert.”
Specifically, the data showed that more than 9,000 child care providers had closed between mid-March and July 31, 2020, and that roughly 1200 of these closures were permanent. It also found that the vast majority of closures were concentrated among small, home-based providers. A county-by-county analysis found that the loss of child-care spots was not spread evenly across California, and that the hardest-hit communities on a child population basis were in rural counties in the northern part of the state.
The Fuller Project was interested in data-driven pieces about the impact of COVID-19 on women, with a particular interest in how the pandemic was affecting the child care sector. Reporter Rikha Sharma Rani, a parent herself, was experiencing the impact of school and childcare closures from the pandemic first hand. That personal experience is what brought her to this story. She contacted the Department of Social Services and asked for detailed data about child care closures at the county level, which they provided. She was then able to build on that data and provide additional analysis to paint a clearer picture of the impact, such as the number of closures per population of children under five. The result was a data set that was one of the most extensive looks at child care closures since the start of the pandemic.
The article was an Apple News top story and was read by over 500,000 people. It was also syndicated by Yahoo! News, included in Politico’s California Playbook and shared by the Economic Security Project. The story contributed significantly to awareness about the growing child care crisis in California due to COVID-19. In September, the California senate passed SB 820, which expanded financial support to child care providers.
However, the real impact of the story was the focus on child care providers themselves. Child care providers are overwhelmingly women and women of color, and many of them are low income. But coverage of the issue overwhelmingly focused on the impact of child care closures on the economy or on families that relied on child care services and could afford to pay for them.. There was little coverage of the women providing the care, who were losing their livelihoods because of the pandemic. Sharma Rani centered them in this piece to underscore that child care closures matter not just because of the impact on the economy, but because the women who provide care matter too.
