In early March, community members gathered for “Reporting on immigration in times of crisis: Wisconsin and beyond” at the Memorial Union Play Circle at UW-Madison. This public discussion, presented by the Center for Journalism Ethics and co-sponsored by the Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies Program and the Office of Strategic Communication, was facilitated by the Madison-based Wisconsin Watch reporter Natalie Yahr, and featured ProPublica reporter Melissa Sanchez.
Sanchez is a Chicago-based investigative reporter covering immigration and labor for ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom. Her reporting has spurred significant policy shifts, including reforms to Chicago’s ticketing debt system. In Wisconsin, an investigative series by ProPublica on the living and working conditions of immigrant laborers in the dairy industry prompted a major policy response. Sanchez’s reporting highlighted language barriers and resulted in the Dane County Sheriff’s office drafting an unprecedented official policy to respond to “residents with limited English proficiency.” Sanchez is the 2026 Sharon Dunwoody Journalist in Residence, a program that offers leading journalists the opportunity to “share their expertise, engage with the campus community, and collaborate with university scholars.”
Sanchez spoke about the challenges of covering immigration issues in Wisconsin and described some of the ethical challenges that journalists are facing at this moment.
Read some highlights from the public discussion:
Yahr: Up until you began reporting on dairy farms in Wisconsin, all of your work at ProPublica had focused on Chicago and Illinois. How and why did you start reporting on Wisconsin?
Sanchez: We were the first office that ProPublica had outside of the national office covering Illinois and Chicago, and we expanded to cover the broader region of the Midwest. A lot of the reporting kind of started with this institution to be honest. I was invited in 2022 to speak at an ethics and equity panel.
Yahr: How did you go about finding people to talk to?
Sanchez: We knew early on that talking to immigrant workers on farms was going to be really hard for a lot of reasons. As you all know, there’s been lots of reporting about dairy in Wisconsin. It’s every day in the news, but often the perspective is coming from an economic perspective and there’s been very little coverage based on the perspectives of the people who do the work of shoveling manure and milking cows. Part of that is because there aren’t a ton of Spanish speakers who are in journalism in Wisconsin and have access to the jobs to do that.
We made flyers in Spanish with my photo, my colleague Miriam’s photo, our names and numbers explaining that we were interested in talking to people who work on dairy farms and people called us. It was like a lot of spaghetti on the wall. We made a lot of videos of ourselves in Spanish and we posted them on Facebook on different pages that were geared toward Latino communities across the state. And then at some point too, we learned to use Tik Tok.
Yahr: How did you get your reporting back to those people afterward?
Sanchez: We did a ton of things like to find people and bring them in and then, as we were producing stories, it was really important to me to get the stories back to those people. I don’t like the idea of writing stories about people and then not having them actually access that reporting. And so the same methods that we used to find them were the methods that we used to get the reporting back to them.
Jose, that little boy’s father, is illiterate. He can’t read in Spanish or in English. We wrote this beautiful, long story that he could never consume. And so, we convinced our ProPublica editors that it was worth investing in paying for somebody to make a beautiful audio version of the story. And then, we made flyers, we made little booklets, and we had QR codes where people could go in and listen to the story.
Find the full livestream and listen to the rest of the conversation here.