Imagine this scenario: Department of Homeland Security agents storm a meatpacking plant in the South, a show of force in the largest workplace raid in a decade. Rounding up workers, they target those who appear to be Latinos, without regard for citizenship. They don’t ask for documentation until hours later.

A worker, overcome by fear, makes a run for it and is tackled by immigration agents, with one putting a boot on the worker’s neck for over 20 seconds, as a video of the encounter shows.

You don’t have to imagine this as some far-flung dystopian scenario that could happen in Trump’s second term because it happened during his first, in Tennessee in 2018.

…

In private conversations with The Bulwark, employees within major newsrooms from ABC News to NBC News, Univision, and the Washington Post expressed doubts as to whether the media is ready to meet this moment.

One veteran NBC News journalist described concerns that the network’s mass deportation coverage would focus on b-roll of immigrants at the border, when the story will largely unfold in the interior of the country: from meatpacking plants to the cities and communities where they live.

“When we keep showing the border, we show that we don’t get it,” the source said. “Stop showing just the border—show churches, show schools, show hospitals.”

“We’ve done a poor job of covering immigration, historically,” Enrique Acevedo, a top Univision talent who interviewed Donald Trump and hosted both the incoming president and Kamala Harris for network town halls during 2024, told The Bulwark. “Most news platforms in the U.S. have focused on what happens at the border and done very little to understand the complexities of immigration coverage. Covering the border to explain our immigration crisis is like covering an ER to explain the COVID pandemic.”

Acevedo added a warning: “This is not a border story—it’s a national story that will have economic impact on entire industries, from food processing to meatpacking plants in Iowa and Nebraska far away from the border. It’s a story about how communities will be ripped apart, with an undocumented community that is overwhelmingly Mexican.”

“The humanitarian catastrophe that deportations will undoubtedly lead to is a story we’re not prepared to cover.”

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