The Weight of Getting It Right: Covering Immigration in America
- Alejandro Morales
- 10 minutes ago
- 3 min read
On Tuesday, August 18, our club welcomed Julia Ainsley, Senior Homeland Security Correspondent for NBC News and author of Undue Process: The Inside Story of Trump's Mass Deportation Program. She came to breakfast to talk about a beat that lands on the front page most mornings - and about what it takes to report it accurately. Our thanks to Rick Rountree for sponsoring the program.
A North Carolina Reporter on a National Beat
Julia is a Davidson College graduate who began her career at Thomson Reuters covering counterterrorism, criminal justice, and immigration. She joined NBC News in 2017 as a national security and justice reporter and became the network's homeland security correspondent in 2022. Today she covers the full range of the Department of Homeland Security's work - immigration enforcement, counterterrorism, the Secret Service, and drug trafficking at the border - from Washington, D.C.
It is a beat with very few easy days. Much of what she reports comes from people inside federal agencies who are describing decisions as they are being made, which means the reporting has to be verified carefully before any of it reaches air.
Three Approaches, One Story
Julia walked us through how U.S. immigration policy has been approached over the past several administrations, and how the current approach differs in both scale and method. She framed the current period as a third approach - mass deportation - and quoted White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller's own summary of the goal: "America is for Americans and Americans only."
She also described a shift many in the room had followed in the news closer to home: the move of Border Patrol operations away from the border and into American cities through what the agency calls roving patrols. Charlotte's operation in November 2025 put that shift on North Carolina's doorstep and made it a local story as much as a national one.
Why the Book Is Called Undue Process
Undue Process was published by Harper in May 2026. It draws on Julia's sources inside the immigration enforcement agencies to document how the administration built what its own officials described as the largest deportation force in U.S. history, and how that effort was received - including the resistance to it from inside government and from the public.
The title points at the question underneath the whole beat: what process is owed to a person before the government acts, and what happens when that process is compressed. Julia's job is not to settle that question. It is to report accurately what is actually happening, so the rest of us can weigh it ourselves.
Why We Serve
Rotary's Four-Way Test begins with a question every reporter has to answer before filing: Is it the TRUTH? Only then does it move on to whether it is fair to all concerned.
That is not a coincidence. Communities cannot make good decisions on bad information. Whatever any of us concludes about immigration policy, we all depend on someone doing the unglamorous work of confirming what is true before it becomes what everyone believes. Journalism done carefully is a form of service above self - the work is hard, the credit is thin, and the community is better for it.
We are grateful when speakers like Julia bring us the story behind the story, and we thank Rick Rountree for making the introduction.
Come and Join Us
We meet every Tuesday at 7:30 AM at Carolina Country Club, 2500 Glenwood Avenue in Raleigh - and on Zoom, if a morning drive across town is not in the cards. Breakfast, an hour of good company, and a speaker worth waking up for.
If you have been curious about Rotary, this is the easy way in. Come as our guest, no commitment. We would love to meet you.
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