Best Place to Find ICE at Night
Motel 6
Not even Tom Bodett could have put a positive spin on this story after Phoenix New Times reporters Antonia Noori Farzan and Joseph Flaherty combed through thousands of court records to uncover a pattern: Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents regularly showed up at one of two corporate-owned Motel 6s in Phoenix to arrest guests who had been deported but had re-entered the country illegally. Our reporters learned that the motels were sending their full guest lists every night to ICE, whose agents were comparing them to the names they had of undocumented immigrants, then making more than 20 arrests when they found matches. The story went viral, and within 24 hours Motel 6 said that it was ending its policy of handing over guest lists, and that the practice had been limited to only two motels in Phoenix. However, in January, the attorney general of Washington state announced that, based on our reporting, his office began an investigation and found at least six more Motel 6 properties that had been handing over information on more than 9,000 guests in that state. The Columbia Journalism Review called Farzan and Flaherty’s reporting “an advertisement for alt-weeklies.” We like to think of that reporting as shining a light on Motel 6 and leaving it on.