A free press isn’t guaranteed absent struggle — often in darkness and against the odds
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, recently announced that it has adopted a policy that creates some internal checks and balances to prevent improper demands being placed on journalists to produce records or the identity of sources.
The new ICE media policy is a long time coming, however.
It’s far from perfect, but I consider it a battle won in my case — which has its roots in the drug and terrorism wars as they existed in the early 2000s during the George W. Bush administration. That’s when my stories for an online news site called Narco News caught the attention of ICE leadership and led to federal agents interrogating me in an effort to get me to cough up my story sources.
The new media policy adopted by ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), came only after Congress forced the agency’s hand via requirements included in the 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act. ICE complied officially in late June of 2022, nearly two years after the agency during the Trump administration issued an administrative subpoena to BuzzFeed News on Dec. 1, 2020.
That subpoena demanded that BuzzFeed identify news sources related to an Oct. 7, 2020, story involving a…
