Pulitzer finalist Astrid Galván on ‘turning point’ in immigration debate

Update: The lineup for this week’s “Stories that Matter” panel has changed. The panel will include Pulitzer Prize-winners Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, Anna Wolfe of Mississippi Today and Nicole Carroll, former editor in chief of USA TODAY and executive director of NEWSWELL.

In 2018, reporter Astrid Galván was covering a remarkable trial in Arizona. 

At the time, the family separation policies of the first Donald Trump administration roiled the country, as parents who crossed the border were detained and sometimes deported without their children. 

Some of those children then faced immigration cases on their own, without their parents. Inside a Phoenix immigration court that summer, Galván watched one such boy named Johan await his hearing before a judge. 

Johan was just 1 year old. 

“At the time, I had an 8-month-old daughter,” Galván said. “I was a first-time mom.” As she watched the boy on trial, she said, she kept imagining her own child. 

Her story from that day documented how the boy waited, first in dress shoes, then in socks, then crying hysterically while being handed from person to person. “I think it really centered the humanity,” she said. “It was a turning point over family separation.”

Journalism, and its role in the country’s most contentious issues, will be the focus of a public forum Feb. 13 at San Joaquin Delta College. The event brings Galván and other journalists honored by the Pulitzer Prizes to Stockton for a conversation about local news, national politics and the future of journalism in the community. 

For Galván, journalism has always been personal. 

As a young girl, her inspiration came from her grandfather, Luis Galván, a sports editor for El Fronterizo in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Growing up, always seeing photographs of him working with athletes and celebrities, Galván knew she wanted to be a reporter.

In 2007, while at Arizona State University, she took local internships, including covering breaking news for The Arizona Republic. She was also part of the Chips Quinn Fellowship, a mentorship program for early-career journalists. 

She joined the Republic as a full-time reporter, covering a Phoenix suburb. At the time, local news of budget cuts and elections overlapped with protests against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose agency became the subject of federal oversight for what a court found was a reliance on racial profiling and constitutional rights violations.

Galván moved to the Albuquerque Journal to cover higher education and later worked with a colleague on a series about police shootings. 

She noted that in that era, before the unrest over the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, police shootings “weren’t given the national spotlight.”

“It was a lot of investigative work and watchdog work, and that was one of the most impactful things I’ve done in my career,” Galván said. 

Galván says one of her greatest strengths is in interviewing, and really listening. “I know it’s obvious,” she said, “but it’s a skill you have to develop. We easily get distracted by what’s going on around us. So it’s important to listen and tune everything out.”

By 2014, Galván was hired as the legislative reporter and border correspondent with The Associated Press, back in Arizona, where those old disputes over immigration policies would soon morph into a national issue under a new presidential administration. By 2018, she was covering the Trump administration’s family separation policies. 

The news led her to immigration court that July, where 1-year-old Johan waited for his hearing. 

According to the court proceedings, Johan’s father brought him to the U.S. The father had been captured almost immediately and deported to Honduras, but Johan remained in Arizona, in the custody of federal authorities. (The child was later returned to Honduras and reunited with his parents.)

The work of a team of AP journalists that year — including Galván’s report on the boy — was entered in the Pulitzer Prizes, and in 2019, Galván and her colleagues were named finalists in the national reporting category. “Any journalist dreams of being mentioned next to the word ‘Pulitzer,’ ” she said.  

Today, after several years editing Axios Latino, Galván is currently the Texas editor for Axios Local, overseeing coverage from Austin, Houston and San Antonio. She lives in El Paso, Texas, where she balances being a full-time journalist with being a full-time mom: Her daughter, who was a baby on that day of the immigration court hearing, now has a younger sister.

Galván said her immigration coverage will help develop larger conversations about the subject and where it’s heading now, under a second Trump administration. “I think that journalists are in a much better position to report on immigration than from his first term,” she said. 

“I love talking to students. I love talking to student journalists. I love talking to members of the community,” she said. “I feel like the most important job we have is connecting with people and connecting with the communities that we write about.”

Jelissa B. King is a student journalist at San Joaquin Delta College.