Welcome to the first Best of the Week of 2019. Among a series of very strong end-of-the-year nominations, the judges have selected two winners from opposite sides of the world.
A sweeping AP investigation by California-based investigative reporters Garance “Poppy” Burke and Martha Mendoza found that the United States is once again institutionalizing thousands of migrant children in crowded shelters, despite warnings that the experience could lead to lifelong trauma. Their national story, based on deep source reporting, was the first to provide shelter-by-shelter detention statistics, numbers the government had been withholding all year.
A comprehensive data package by Washington-based data editor Meghan Hoyer and NY-based data journalist Larry Fenn was downloaded by over 60 clients, and also led to companion stories focusing on data in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Arizona and Texas that were also widely used. AP also made the raw numbers available to members ahead of publication, allowing others to pursue their own angles.
Migrant teens walk inside the Tornillo detention camp in Tornillo, Texas, Dec. 13, 2018. At year’s end some 5,400 detained migrant children in the U.S. were sleeping in shelters holding more than 1,000 other children.
AP Photo / Andres Leighton
A private security guard throws a soccer ball back inside the Tornillo detention camp for migrant teens in Tornillo, Texas, Dec. 13, 2018.
AP Photo / Andres Leighton
A migrant teen plays soccer, left, as others gather at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, a former Job Corps site that now houses them, in Homestead, Fla., Dec. 10, 2018.
AP Photo / Brynn Anderson
Migrant teens walk in a line at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, a former Job Corps site that now houses them, in Homestead, Fla., Dec. 10, 2018. On sprawling country ranches and busy city centers, in suburban homes and huge crowded tents, the Trump administration has scattered about 14,300 migrant children across the country in a vast network of 150 shelters, detention centers and foster homes over the last 20 months.
AP Photo / Brynn Anderson
Manuela Marcelino, 11, left, sits with her father, Manuel Marcelino Tzah, from Guatemala, inside their apartment hours after her release from immigrant detention, July 18, 2018, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Manuela was taken from him and held in a Southwest Keys facility in Houston for nearly two months. He said his family is still trying to process the pain of separation and detention. “She’s doing OK now, she is going to school,” said Marcelino, whose immigration case is pending in a New York court near his new home in Brooklyn.
AP Photo / Bebeto Matthews
A woman and children enter a Cayuga Centers social-services facility in New York, June 21, 2018. Cayuga Centers has gone from newcomer to one of the biggest names in the $1.5 billion-a-year business of housing immigrant kids under government detention. As of early December 2018, it was caring for nearly 900 migrant children, according to confidential government data obtained by the AP.
AP Photo / Richard Drew
Yeni Gonzalez, right, from Guatemala, stands with her children, from left, ages 6 to 11, after they were reunited, July 13, 2018, at a Cayuga Centers social-services facility where the children had been housed in New York. As of early December, Cayuga Centers was caring for nearly 900 migrant children, according to confidential government data obtained by the AP.
AP Photo / Mary Altaffer
Cecilio Ramirez, right, an immigrant from El Salvador who entered the United States illegally with his son, Omar Ramirez, left, earlier this year, sit together in San Antonio, Dec. 12, 2018. Omar was separated from his father and held for five months in a shelter overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Exclusive data obtained by the AP reveals the expanse of the federal government’s program that detains and shelters migrant children, now at the center of the Trump administration’s hardline approach to immigration.
AP Photo / Eric Gay
Cecilio Ramirez, right, an immigrant from El Salvador who entered the United States illegally with his son, Omar Ramirez, left, earlier this year, walks home after visiting a store with his partner, Zaida Del Carmen Molina, and her son Cristian, also from El Salvador, Dec. 12, 2018, in San Antonio. Omar was separated from his father and held for five months in a shelter overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
AP Photo / Eric Gay
The main story and an abridged version were each used by well over 200 customers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, with 19,000 Facebook engagements and more than 50,000 views. One day after the story, Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation aimed at shutting down two mass facilities holding more than 4,000 minors in Texas and Florida.
For their investigation, Burke, Mendoza, Hoyer and Fenn share half of this week’s award.
Our other winner comes from an equally impactful AP investigation by Beijing-based video journalist Dake Kang, newsperson Yanan Wang and Mendoza, again, which showed that clothing made inside an internment camp housing Muslim Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang region is being shipped to a US company that supplies sportswear to American schools and universities.
To do this, they cross-referenced satellite imagery, Chinese state media reports and the address of a Chinese supplier on bills of lading destined for Badger Sportswear in North Carolina. Faced with the evidence, the chairman of the Chinese supplier acknowledged to AP the existence of a factory inside the camp. Wang and photographer Han Guan Ng shot footage of the compound from outside and were briefly detained by police in the process. Kang then traveled to Kazakhstan to get multiple on-camera accounts of forced labor in the Chinese camps.
Sala Jimobai poses in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Dec. 7, 2018, with her son, Aqzhol Dakey, holding a picture of her husband, Dakey Zhunishan, outside the office of an advocacy group for ethnic Kazakhs born in China. Jimobai says her husband, a sheep herder, was detained in an internment camp in China’s far western Xinjiang region and later transferred to a factory in October for a month before being released. He is now confined to his brother’s village in China.
AP Photo/ Dake Kang
Muslim trainees work in a garment factory at the Hotan Vocational Education and Training Center in Hotan, Xinjiang, northwest China, in an image from undated video run by China’s CCTV. China’s state broadcaster CCTV aired the report on the facility on Oct. 16, 2018, with Muslim trainees telling the camera how they have been saved from dangerous and poor lives and how grateful they are to the authorities.
CCTV via AP Video
Mainur Medetbek cries in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Dec. 8, 2018, as she speaks about her husband’s detainment in a Chinese interment camp. Medetbek says her husband was detained over a year ago and was recently transferred to a factory, where he is required to live in dormitories six days a week. She says the ordeal has deprived her family of income and driven her to contemplate suicide many times.
AP Photo/ Dake Kang
Mainur Medetbek holds a portrait of her detained husband at her home in a village outside Almaty, Kazakhstan, Dec. 8, 2018.
AP Photo/ Dake Kang
Tursynbek Kuzhyrbek, a Chinese born immigrant to Kazakhstan and a cook, holds up a picture of his parents in a restaurant in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Dec. 7, 2018. Kuzhyrbek says his father, an elderly retiree, was forced to work at a factory in China’s far western Xinjiang region for four months, and only allowed to return home after Kuzhyrbek’s mother injured her hand.
AP Photo/ Dake Kang
Mussa Imamadiuly, a truck driver, poses in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Dec. 7, 2018, with a picture of his wife’s younger brother. Imamadiuly says that shortly after his marriage, his new wife’s brother was arrested and taken to a Chinese internment camp. Last month, they heard through relatives still in China that police had notified them that the brother was about to be transferred to a factory.
AP Photo/ Dake Kang
A building with the words “Neighborhood Center” at the top is seen behind barbed wire fences in the Artux City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center in western China's Xinjiang region, Dec. 3, 2018. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries, in what activists call “black factories.”
AP Photo / Ng Han Guan
A satellite image released by Planet Labs, Buildings are seen around the Kunshan Industrial Park in Artux in western China’s Xinjiang region, in a Sept. 17, 2018 satellite image released by Planet Labs.
Planet Labs via AP
Slogans reading “Technical skill in hand, no worries finding a job,” and “Theme of prospering the people, with service as the central tenet” are displayed, Dec. 5, 2018, on the barbed wire fences around the Hotan “apparel employment training base” in western China’s Xinjiang region. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained.
AP Photo / Ng Han Guan
Muslim trainees confess their ways to local officials in the Hotan Vocational Education and Training Center in Hotan, Xinjiang, northwest China, in an image from undated video run by China's CCTV. China’s state broadcaster CCTV aired the report on the facility on Oct. 16, 2018, with Muslim trainees telling the camera how they have been saved from dangerous and poor lives and how grateful they are to the authorities.
CCTV via AP Video
Muslim trainees work in a garment factory at the Hotan Vocational Education and Training Center in Hotan, Xinjiang, northwest China, in an image from undated video run by China’s CCTV. China’s state broadcaster CCTV aired the report on the facility on Oct. 16, 2018.
CCTV via AP Video
Rushan Abbas, 51, of Herndon, Va., holds a photo of her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, Dec. 17, 2018, in Washington. Rushan Abbas said her sister is among the many Uighur Muslims detained in China, and that her sister was taken to what the government calls a vocational center, although she has no specific information on whether her sister is being forced to work.
AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin
Nurbakyt Kaliaskar cries in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Dec. 6, 2018, as she speaks about her daughter’s detainment in a Chinese internment camp. Kaliaskar says her 25-year-old daughter is a college graduate who had a white-collar job. Then she got swept up in a Chinese crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang.
AP Photo/ Dake Kang
Residents pass the entrance to the Hotan “apparel employment training base” in western China's Xinjiang region. This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries – some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent.
AP Photo / Ng Han Guan
The story had immediate impact, with Badger Sportswear pledging to suspend shipments from the factory, and U.S. Customs vowing to investigate. In Indonesia, the foreign minister called in the Chinese ambassador to discuss the issue.
For their daring and important work, Kang, Wang and Mendoza share the other half of AP’s Best of the Week.