In the past few months, federal agents have deported migrant farmworkers and caused high school exchange students who thought they were safe in Vermont to leave. A legal resident of the state was almost successfully “disappeared” outside the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester. People have been detained for hours at the U.S.-Canada border.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January, Vermonters have seen the human toll of his hard-line immigration and border-control policies. Local reporters, including our team at Seven Days, have been scrambling to keep up with the explosion of news.
“Is it an odd coincidence that Vermont has been at the center of so many national cases? Or do you think there’s a reason?” Lucy Tompkins asked me on a Zoom call last week. Those are great questions — two of many Lucy will seek to answer when she joins Seven Days in July to report on immigration, refugee communities and the northern border.
This will be one of the most active and crucial beats we chase this year.
We found Lucy through Report for America, the same national service program for journalists that gave us rural reporter Rachel Hellman, who is wrapping up her three-year stint with Seven Days this month. Newsrooms across the U.S. compete for these talented young writers, who seek journalism jobs at local media outlets through RFA. We had to make a case for a beat that would pass muster with the org and also attract good potential candidates. We chose immigration, two months before Trump won the presidency. A number of qualified reporters expressed interest. Lucy was our top choice.
With good reason. In the seven and a half years since she graduated from the University of Montana with a BA in journalism, Lucy got a Fulbright scholarship to study international asylum law in Germany, where she also interviewed and photographed Syrian refugee women. During the pandemic, a reporting fellowship returned her to the U.S. on a near-empty plane to write national coronavirus stories for the New York Times. She’s covered housing and homelessness for the Texas Tribune. Fluent in Spanish, she’s currently working on an investigative project for Documented, a nonprofit newsroom in New York City.
Impressive as those outlets are, Lucy, a native Montanan, said she misses the community journalism she practiced at the daily Missoulian in an internship during college and for seven months postgraduation. One of her local investigative projects, about unregulated, abusive residential treatment programs for troubled teens, led to tougher state legislation, as well as raids to remove children.
“What drew me to being a reporter in the first place was getting to make a difference in your local community,” Lucy said. Also, “I really care about the health, and survival, of local news” and “bringing coverage of issues that need more attention was exciting to me.” The Seven Days job fit the bill. Bonus: Her dad grew up in Waitsfield and attended the University of Vermont.
It’s not the first time Seven Days has shone a light on immigrant communities in our state. In 2015 we hired Kymelya Sari, a Singaporean Muslim fresh out of Columbia Journalism School, to find stories, and perspectives, that were missing in Vermont media. In the four years she wrote for Seven Days, Kyme’s award-winning work ranged from an inside look at a new-American women’s soccer team to sensitive reporting on a Bhutanese man who killed his wife with a meat cleaver.
Today’s political landscape is more perilous for people who leave their home countries to work, find sanctuary or make a new life in Vermont. If the past few months are any indication, Lucy will find plenty to write about.
Her beat is partially funded by Report for America, but Seven Days is required to raise money from readers to pay for the rest. Our goal this year: $50,000.
Thanks to some generous donors, we’re already partway there. Vermont Coffee Company founder Paul Ralston, who supported Rachel’s rural reporting beat, has issued a challenge: He’ll match $20,000 in reader contributions through a crowdfunding drive that starts today.
Can you pitch in to get us there? Unlike Super Reader contributions to Seven Days, these one-time gifts to boost our immigration beat are tax-deductible — they go directly to the GroundTruth Project, the organization behind Report for America, which will reimburse Seven Days for our expenses.
With your help — and Lucy’s — we’ll keep the news coming.
Related Stories
This article appears in The Summer Preview 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
