It took me a day to realize that, when my source said they were trying to connect me with “the American lady who got interrogated by ICE,” they were talking about a different person than I had asked about.
Every day since January 20, the number of people detained by immigration officials in our community grows. And every day our team pulls a little more thread on the breadth of the immigration detention operations happening in our area.
We’re a scrappy team of five trying to track the movements of an especially chaotic federal government, so we are always behind this curve. Chasing after it.
We’ve reported on a fraction of these stories, but all of them live in our heads and weigh on our hearts. Some people we’ve spoken to have been too afraid to even speak with a reporter, much less go on the record with their story. It’s something reporters get used to, and it is never RANGE’s policy as a community newsroom to push people to put themselves, their families or communities in harm’s way.
The result, though, is a crisis in Spokane that many people don’t see. And our local newsrooms, including RANGE, aren’t built to meet the need.
Yet.
We keep hearing about families torn apart — together at church one minute, only for one partner to disappear by the time the other partner and kids get home from running errands. We keep hearing about people voluntarily giving away their rights because men with guns tell them to.
There’s more than a news gap in Spokane, there’s a basic information gap.
All of us have certain rights under the law, regardless of our immigration or citizenship status. The government has specific legal burdens and responsibilities under the law, whether they tell you they do or not. But the first step to defending your rights is knowing you have them in the first place. Many of our neighbors don’t.
This information gap has created a rights gap.
It’s been just over four years since RANGE wrote its first story about the uniquely impossible and often life-threatening place US law and border policy puts migrants — especially laborers — with our story about the near death of Eduardo Muñoz Lara (Essential, but Unprotected, Feb 2021). Since then, we’ve had countless conversations with local advocates and organizers about how badly communities need actionable information to stay safe.
That need is amplified when a person’s first language isn’t English.
For years, organizations like Latinos en Spokane, Mujeres in Action and (more recently in our area), Familias Unidas por la Justicia, have warned us that Spanish-speaking migrants are just the most convenient targets, and that our deportation apparatus would broaden its reach if it could.
That is exactly what has happened (‘They just take people’, Feb 2025).
I live in fear that the ground is shifting so quickly none of us can keep up, but we certainly have a better shot if we have an accessible source of news. On the other hand, I live in tremendous hope for what might happen once we have the capacity to do this work, and just how many people in the Spokane community would show up to stand in solidarity once these stories can penetrate barriers of community, culture and language.
Spokane needs — and our neighbors deserve — Spanish-language news and reporting. We have always needed it.
We need it today more than ever.
To jump straight to how you can support bilingual news in Spokane, click here.
It took me over two years to realize no one is coming to save Spokane.
That’s how long RANGE has been writing emails and grant applications to foundations all over the US looking to fund bilingual journalists.
That’s how long we’ve been knocking on every halfway promising door trying to tell the story of the unique challenges families here face, and how, despite what they may think they know about so-called “blue states,” our region needs a dedicated, Spanish-language news team to fill some truly huge information gaps and build the kind of trust communities deserve to have in any media that claims to serve them.
I knew this would be an uphill battle. I’ve spent a lot of my professional life trying to convince people who may have never heard of Spokane that my hometown is a place worth caring about.
And philanthropy, in a very real sense, is built on pity. The hardest-luck cases — as decided by some of the wealthiest people in a community or a nation — get the most money.
From a national lens, Spokane has never been broken enough to be sexy to philanthropists. Our region has faced the withering and uneasy transition away from extraction industries – but our economy isn’t as bad as the rust belt! We have thousands of migrant farm and construction laborers working in awful conditions under constant threat – but not as many as California or Texas!
Our neighbors are being rounded up and taken from their families near their homes, jobs and places of worship, but — and this is a direct quote from a recent call I had with a funder — “It’s going to be hard to build a case for RANGE, because Washington is a blue state.”
That was one of the more encouraging conversations I’ve had recently. The program officer I spoke with was incredibly kind, and we’re still pursuing that funder, helping explain why the Inland Northwest and RANGE deserve support.
But after more than two years of hearing similar feedback, it really feels like time to refocus on the one place we can trust will care about the health, safety and lives of Spokanites: Spokane itself.
To be fair to myself: Spokane isn’t the wealthiest place, and big, national foundations have big, national dollars. I had been hoping to use national money to demonstrate how much good we can do before asking our community to pay for it.
To be fair to the industry: RANGE has been the beneficiary of a lot of support over the years, from local and even some national funders — support we wouldn’t be here without. But our community can’t wait for the sentiments of a single funder or the national mood to look our way before we take action. Spokanites and people across our entire region are under threat right now.
I’ve known this my entire professional life, and yet I keep having to relearn it: No one is going to save us but us.
We have to help ourselves. We have to help our neighbors.
It has taken me my entire life, more or less, to understand just how deeply my hometown, Spokane, will support the things it cares about. I’m hoping to deepen that appreciation again, starting today:
RANGE is raising money for deep, community-embedded, Spanish-language reporting, and we need our community’s help.
I’m sharing a PDF pitch deck that has all the details I send to all of our prospective funders, and I’ll make the pitch directly here:
RANGE has always wanted to eliminate the barriers of trust that people feel toward journalism by showing up where people are and giving them meaningful news and information they can use to make their lives better.
That means going out of our way to break through those barriers ourselves, not waiting for people to find their way to us.
Our ambition for this work is big, and would add about 50% to our current budget. The need is also a lot more immediate than it was when we started this, so we will need to be extremely flexible with this fundraiser.
I’ll go into greater detail about the numbers in a moment, but if you want to help, you can do so in several ways:
- Make a one-time or recurring tax-deductible gift — by clicking here or emailing me.
- Buy some ads. Sponsor our newsletters — if you’re a RANGE reader with an organization or business, this is the best way to reach other RANGE readers. Email Val Osier for more information.
- Become a member or increase your membership — our memberships are the most affordable way to support, and recurring dollars are how we become sustainable. Click here.
The presentation I’ve been sending to those big foundations has a pretty hefty budget at the back. This budget represents what we think is our best shot at building a team that can truly connect deeply with community from the start.
Our goal is to fund the whole thing as quickly as possible so we can go out and start reporting, writing and sharing our work in both English and Spanish.
People are living in fear now, though, and we can’t afford to wait until conditions are perfect, so we’ve created a phased approach to make sure we’re delivering information in the form people need ASAP.
A small team like this will cost as much as $170,000 per year, and will support two Spanish-fluent positions, along with a budget for freelancing and other support. As soon as we hit our first milestone, though, we will begin translating our stories and contracting more freelance reporting:
Milestone 1 — Freelance translation, reporting, editing & admin $13,250 – $21,850
Milestone 2 — Hire Spanish-fluent reporter/editor w/ lived experience $72,750 – $95,850
Milestone 3 — Hire community organizer $132,250 – $169,850
We are working to pull together freelance reporters and people with Spanish translation skills and expertise now.
- Milestone 1 funding will allow us to pay people for their time and expertise.
- Milestone 2 funding will allow us to find the staff reporter/editor we need to speak directly and clearly to sources who feel most comfortable speaking in Spanish
- Milestone 3 funding will allow us to hire a community organizer to deepen and strengthen our relationships in and across communities.
If you have any questions about this work or ideas for how to help, send me an email or give me a call.
The big funders might be right that Spokane isn’t special.
If that’s true, then it’s yet one more reason RANGE’s work is so important.
If we are just a dime-a-dozen, mid-sized city in a relatively rural region, that means the fear, the uncertainty, the need we are experiencing here is replicated across the US in communities of all sizes and shapes.
It means many and perhaps most communities like Spokane also lack the robust, bilingual news we’re talking about building at RANGE. That gives us an opportunity to demonstrate the power of our community and communities like ours to do good for and do right by the people we share this place with.
I need to remember to stop waiting for the rest of America to catch up with Spokane.
RANGE is ready to do this work, the need in the Inland Northwest can’t get any more real, and I trust our community to step up.
Let’s build something that makes people’s lives better now and that has the support and longevity to change Spokane for good.
