Behind her investigation
Through public records requests, and journalism embedded in the community, Tina Vasquez exposes a sordid reality behind poultry plants during the pandemic
Tina Vasquez knew about the terrible conditions for workers in poultry plants from her extensive reporting on immigration. When the pandemic started, she turned to her own community in North-Carolina to investigate how things were different amid the new threat posed by COVID-19. What she found was alarming: while Americans were empting stores and rushing to buy chicken, fearful that food supplies may run out, immigrant workers in one of the largest processing plants in the nation were risking their lives.
In “The Incalculable Cost of Cheap Chicken—and the Hidden Industry That Shoulders It” Vasquez shines a light on the common hiring practice of using staffing agencies and how it allows big corporations to wash their hands of liability, while a mostly immigrant workforce — much of it undocumented — faced even riskier conditions.
The investigation released in July is a joint project by Type Investigations and Scalawag, a member of the URL Network (palabra. is also a member of the network.)
“Nobody really talks about the role that staffing agencies play in hiring undocumented workers to work in these plants and then they're treated a fundamentally different way,” said Vasquez, in an interview with palabra. “So with that understanding, I wanted to see how COVID complicated that dynamic in plants.”
In this installment of our video conversations palabra. RECLAIMED., Vasquez talks to us about what inspired her investigation, her surprising experience with filing Freedom of Information Act Requests, and how she build trust with a community that stood to lose a lot by going public to denounce abuses.
“I never wanted the take-away of this reporting to be: They’re hiring undocumented workers,” Vasquez said. “My issue was how badly they were being treated and how little they were being paid.”
Mariaisela Martínez was a pivotal source and voice in the investigation. She was hired by the staffing agency to work as a housekeeper at a poultry processing plant in Siler City, North Carolina. Photo by Tina Vasquez.
Vasquez also spoke about the importance of making it clear sources know the stakes of being part of a story, and also talked about her responsibility to make sure that they’re protected.
We also explored an often overlooked topic — the need for self care when working on deep-dive investigations or covering traumatic events in a community.
“I wasn't always good at taking care of myself during the pandemic. So working on reporting like this where, you know, the stakes are high and you have like daily reporting. It just felt overwhelming. And then there's a pandemic and then it's hard to concentrate. And so being kind to myself and understanding, like it is what it is, if I can't get this done today,” she said. “Just trying to remember that I’m human too and that I have lots of other responsibilities to my family.”
---
Tina Vasquez is a senior staff writer at The Counter, where she reports on gender, labor, immigration, and food systems. She is The Counter’s first immigration reporter. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Prism, a woman of color-led non-profit news outlet centering the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. There, she reported on gender justice, workers’ rights, and immigration. Prior to Prism, Vasquez was a senior reporter at Rewire.News, where she built out the first beat at a national outlet dedicated to covering reproductive injustice in immigrant communities. Vasquez was the southern fellow in Type Investigations’ 2020-2021 Ida B. Wells Fellowship and a member of Poynter’s 2021 Power of Diverse Voices: Writing Workshop for Journalists of Color. She is a recipient of a 2018 Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) Media Excellence Award, a 2015 Media Consortium Impact Award, and an alumna of the Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) workshop. She is currently working on a book for The New Press about reproductive injustice in the U.S. immigration system.