"When Deportation is a Death Sentence: Covering Immigration in the Trump Era."

Sarah Stillman​
Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Thursday, April 11, 2019, 6:30 p.m. | MacMillan Hall, Room 117

Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers criminal justice, immigration, and other policy issues. She also directs the Global Migration Project at Columbia Journalism School, where she runs an investigative team working on immigration and refugee issues. For The New Yorker, she has written on topics ranging from civil asset forfeiture to debtors prisons, and from Mexico’s drug cartels to Bangladesh’s garment-factory workers. Among Stillman's recent New Yorker stories is “No Refuge,” an investigation that documented more than sixty cases of asylum-seekers and other immigrants  deported to their deaths or other harms. Stillman is a MacArthur Fellow.

Stillman got her start covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2012, she won a National Magazine Award for her reporting on labor abuses against foreign war-zone workers on U.S. military bases; she also received the Michael Kelly Award, an Overseas Press Club Award for international human-rights reporting, and the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism. Her reporting on the high-risk use of young people as confidential informants in the war on drugs received a George Polk Award and the Molly National Journalism Prize. Before joining The New Yorker, Stillman co-taught a seminar at Yale on the Iraq War, and also ran a creative-writing workshop for four years at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a maximum-security men’s prison in Connecticut; she now teaches a long-form reporting class at Yale. Her work is included in “The Best American Magazine Writing 2012” and “The Best American Magazine Writing 2017.”