Earlier this week, Business Insider's contributor Lila Hassan was awarded a Front Page Award by the Newswomen's Club of New York. She won in the category of "Online: Investigative Reporting" for her pieces, "Armed and untouchable: ICE's history of deadly force" and "ICE agents 'don't fire warning shots'. Both stories were edited by Esther Kaplan, and Lila worked with the nonprofit newsrooms Type Investigations and The Trace throughout her reporting.
Lila's investigations revealed how ICE, a notoriously opaque agency, handles the use of force in the field and how their training program focuses more on avoiding legal liability in the wake of an incident, rather than how to de-escalate confrontations. Through analyzing years of never-before-published records and exploring a trove of exclusive training materials, Lila's work uncovered a pattern of excessive force used by ICE, and a system that rarely holds agents who are accused of doing so accountable.
"Lila's dogged pursuit of ICE use-of-force logs allowed readers to learn, for the first time, how often this massive law enforcement agency deploys deadly force," said Esther Kaplan. "And her sensitive field reporting work gave us extraordinary access to what it's like to be on the receiving end."
NYU Law's Immigrant Rights Clinic plans to include Lila's reporting in its teaching syllabus, and the clinic's director is using her reporting to help develop a new legal argument that racial discrimination and human rights abuses by ICE should lead to asylum grants.