When Lucy Tompkins signed on to be our immigration reporter in 2025, I offered a prediction in this column that sadly has come true: “This will be one of the most active and crucial beats we chase this year.”
Two weeks after she started in July, Lucy broke the story of the detention of Winooski schools superintendent Wilmer Chavarria, a U.S. citizen returning home to Vermont from his native Nicaragua.
In the six months since, she has covered the escalation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, detentions and surveillance; local reactions to them, including the establishment of a legal defense fund; and religious services for migrant farmworkers. In August, Lucy nearly got arrested herself while reporting at the Haskell Free Library & Opera House in Derby Line, which straddles the U.S.-Canada border.
All the while, she has been taking stock of that political boundary that shapes northern Vermont — literally and figuratively. Once a friendly divide between good neighbors, now it’s a visible symbol of difference between two countries that have become more adversarial since President Donald Trump won a second term. His immigration crackdown, coupled with our proximity to Canada, has pushed Vermont — and Vermonters — onto the front line.
A year into Trump’s rule, “I wanted to know how things have changed along the border” since the administration of former president Joe Biden, Lucy told her editors.
Since fall she’s been “gathering string” — reporter lingo for the process of collecting scenes and encounters — for this week’s cover story. In the course of reporting “Dividing Line,” Lucy rode along with a Border Patrol officer from the Richford station, heard immigration cases at the federal courthouse in Burlington, talked with people who have been detained and deported. It helps that she speaks fluent Spanish.
Lucy also knocked on the door of Sheila Hardy, who lives on Ayers Hill Road northwest of Richford, a current hot spot for illegal border crossings. The presence of law enforcement makes Hardy feel safer, she told Seven Days, but also, on occasion, surveilled. “Before, they’d go by once or twice a day,” Hardy said of federal agents. “Now it’s many times. We see them shining lights, checking cameras.” She added: “If you go berry picking and set off a sensor, they’ll be here.”
Lucy’s piece is observational and insightful — a classic “show, don’t tell” approach to storytelling. At the same time, it’s informed by all of her prior reporting — one of the many benefits of a defined beat. Consulting editor Ken Ellingwood, who once covered the southwest border for the Los Angeles Times and wrote a book about it, coached her along the way.
“I wanted the story to feel balanced in how it focused on all of the players who are part of the system and affected by it,” Lucy said. “That’s always the pressure you feel as a reporter to get right.”
Seven Days found Lucy through Report for America, a national service program that places aspiring journalists in newsrooms across the country. RFA facilitates the matchmaking and, in the first year of a possible three-year stint, pays half the corps member’s salary. The balance comes from generous Seven Days Super Readers who finance Lucy’s important reporting.
Before she joined our news team, Lucy had a reporting fellowship at the New York Times and the Texas Tribune. Earlier in her career she wrote for the daily Missoulian in Montana, her home state, which also shares a border with Canada that is “so remote, it gets no attention,” Lucy said.
My guess is she’ll never see it the same way again.
This article appears in January 21 • 2026.
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