As California Watch ramps up distribution of its work, we are experimenting with different ways to reach the California public.

Our goal is to distribute our stories as widely as possible, in as many media formats as possible – in the hope that we will be able to spark a conversation on critically important issues affecting many Californians.

Typically, we like to give media outlets interested in running a story a heads up of a week or two – or more –  so they will have an opportunity to supplement our reports with their own local reporting. They may even collaborate with us in the reporting.

This week, however, we had to shorten our distribution time frame considerably on a story Nathanael Johnson had been working on for weeks – the near tripling of maternal mortality rates in California over the past decade.

Nathanael discovered that California's Department of Public Health had been sitting on a report written in 2008 detailing this trend.

On January 26, a nonprofit health organization published an alert pointing to similar distressing trends nationwide. The alert was beginning to attract press attention. A story could break at any time that would take the wind out of all the work Nathanael had already done. So we felt that we should release our story quickly to provide a strong California perspective on a breaking national story.

We knew we could put the story on our Web site and hope that it would go "viral."  We considered that as an option but decided even with late notice, we would reach out to other news organizations.

Imagine trying to coordinate publication of a major story with a dozen news outlets, encompassing print, broadcast and online media. With just a day's notice, several media partners responded rapidly, and ran the story on their front pages, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Bakersfield Californian, Santa Rosa Press Democrat and Orange County Register.

Michael Montgomery, who works jointly for California Watch and KQED, prepared a report for KQED's the California Report, which aired on 28 public radio stations around the state. KGO-TV in San Francisco aired a report on its 11 p.m. newscast. New America Media distributed the story to ethnic media outlets. The issue was the subject of a one-hour discussion on KQED's Forum, hosted by Michael Krasny. Alternet also carried the story.

This heartbreaking issue is likely to get even wider attention in the days ahead, as it should. While we would far prefer to give our media partners adequate time to localize our stories, there will be times that we will have to throw out preconceived timetables, and we will have no choice but to move rapidly to get a story into circulation. Being nimble is the name of today's game.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last fall held an "Industry Day" on detention reform as a way to get feedback from current and potential contractors and other interested parties. The event was closed to the news media.

ICE provided to the Center for Investigative Reporting a list of the companies represented, but would not disclose who the attendees were. The event was held at the Julie Myers Conference room at ICE headquarters.

The companies in attendance range from builders to current jailers to the Royal Bank of Canada. Several already have detention-related contracts or are staffed with former ICE or the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials.

Here's the list of the companies, as provided by ICE (with light editing):
1. K4 Solutions, Inc. (past DHS contractors)
2. McConnell International, LLC (an executive was formerly with INS.)
3. The Dozoretz Group, LLC (Nina Dozoretz, formerly with the Division of Immigration Health Service; recently returned to the government to work with ICE on detainee health care.)
4. PSA-Dewberry, Inc. (architects)
5. Proteus On Demand Facilities (builders)
6. Kelly, Anderson & Associates (The company has several former high-ranking Homeland Security officials on its staff, including a former chief of the Border Patrol.)
7. Arc Aspicio, LLC
8. Stanley Associates
9. Pike County Corrections Facility (currently holds detainees)
10. Pike County Commissioners Office
11. Northrop Grumman Corporation
12. Worchester County Jail (currently holds detainees)
13. LCS Corrections (ICE contractor)
14. CACI, Inc. (ICE contractor)
15. Emerald Companies (ICE contractor)
16. Nortel Government Solutions (DHS contractor)
17. Youth Services International
18. Capgemini Government Solutions (DHS contractor)
19. USIS (DHS contractor, background investigations)
20. MGT of America (ICE contractor)
21. The CMC Group (builders)
22. Ernst & Young
23. KeyPoint Government Solutions (Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff on board of directors, DHS contractors)
24. The Forest Group, Inc.
25. Community Education Centers, Inc.
26. CCA (ICE contractor)
27. Unique Comp Inc. (CBP contractor)
28. Office of Federal Detention Trustee
29. Management & Training Corporation (ICE contractor)
30. Strategic Business Alliance
31. Health Insurance LLC
32. JJ DeLuca Company, Inc. (construction)
33. NetStar 1 (ICE/DHS contractor, data management)
34. GEO Group (ICE contractor)
35. Global Integrated Security
36. iSECUREtrac
37. Oldcastle Precast Modular & Security (builder)
38. Sundt Construction
39. KIMBALL furniture
40. Royal Bank of Canada
41. Frederick County Adult Detention (ICE contractor)
42. Argyle Corrections Group
43. ManTech (DHS contractor)
44. GEO Transportation (ICE contractor)
45. Volunteers of America
46. Price Waterhouse Coopers (DHS contractor)
47. Correctional Eye Care Services
48. STG International (DIHS contractor)
49. Dun & Bradstreet Gov. Solutions
50. Cornell Companies (ICE contractor)
51. Loredo Lomas Properties (real estate)
52. IBM
53. RTR Technologies engineering
54. Immigration Centers of America (ICE contractor)
55. Nabholtz Construction Corporation
56. Accenture (DHS contractor)

While immigration reform advocates wait for Congress to fix the nation's broken immigration system, the Department of Homeland Security says it’s committed to its pledge to overhaul immigration detention.

But the department needs help. And officials are looking for ideas. The agencies that run immigration detention and detainee health care are turning, in some cases, to the same people, consultants and companies that have been advising or working with those agencies for years.

For example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the department’s investigative arm and jailers to some 30,000 immigrant detainees on any given day, in the fall hosted an “Industry Day” event, where agency officials outlined to an audience of mostly government contractors their plans and goals to re-make detention.

ICE officials told attendees that reform is badly needed, and acknowledged shortcomings, some of which have been outlined in a report issued by DHS in early October.

The thrust of the three-hour gathering — which attracted representatives from nearly 60 companies, consultants and detention watchers but was closed to news media — was “to begin a dialogue with current or prospective detention service providers for the purpose of sharing the basic premises of our reform efforts, secure feedback and begin to expand our market research,” according to the event posting on the government contracting Web site FedBizOpps.gov.

Attendees included various former immigration officials now in the private sector, defense contractors, the Royal Bank of Canada, IBM and a host of efficiency experts, builders and other consultants, including a company that has former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff on its board of directors.

"This is a pivotal moment right now in terms of immigration, in terms of detention reform," said attendee Nina Dozoretz who until recently ran a health-care related consulting firm. "I’m optimistic – there's a big commitment from ICE to move this forward."

Dozoretz retired in August 2004 as the associate director of the Division of Immigration Health Services after spending 20 years as a public health service official.

In November — shortly after the event and days after she spoke to CIR — Dozoretz returned to ICE to oversee the health-care overhaul for the Office of Detention and Removal Operations. She said that the reform efforts were what brought her back to ICE.

Dozoretz, who also worked as vice president for the detention monitor and ICE contractor Nakamoto Group, recently appeared in a New York Times article on the issue of detainee deaths.

Homeland Security Department officials have outlined the intended overhaul, including more oversight, centralizing contracts and a custody classification system. The pledged reforms are part of a shift from a broad-based, one-size-fits-all, lock-up system toward a more civil approach.

Mike Magee, a Homeland Security consultant who formerly ran ICE’s criminal alien program for state and local prisons and jails, said civil detention is a good idea, but will be difficult to implement.

The goal is to spend wiser and use alternatives to detention, such as ankle-bracelet monitors when detention isn’t appropriate or necessary.

On Monday, John Morton, the assistant secretary for ICE, spoke about the ongoing reform effort, including a forthcoming detainee locator system, at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

But the big money – and big challenges – remain in detaining immigrants, attendees say. ICE has signed several new contracts to build or expand immigration detention facilities in the past year. The agency’s push to track down more immigrants with criminal charges or convictions may also increase the need for detention bed space. Known as Secure Communities, the ICE program helps local law enforcement agencies screen people in custody for their immigration status.

In a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, GEO Group Inc., one of the government’s biggest contractors for immigration detention, pointed toward anticipated growth of federal detention, particularly immigrants. That means more money. From GEO's third-quarter report:

"We believe ICE will continue to emphasize the detention and removal of criminal aliens throughout the country. ICE has been allocated approximately $1.4 billion for this purpose. We believe that this federal initiative to target, detain, and deport criminal aliens throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years."

For years, ICE has said that deporting criminal aliens has been its top priority, but in practice immigration agents New York Times grabbed whomever they could. This new Secure Communities program claims to re-focus its priority.

ICE has plans to roll out the program across the country by 2013, making its database available to every law enforcement agency nationwide. In the first year of its existence, ICE identified more than 111,000 criminal immigrants in 11 states.

But there’s no more money in this year’s budget for major reform, attendees were told. Senior agency officials, among them Phyllis Coven, the director of the Office of Detention Planning and Policy, and David Venturella, the director of Detention and Removal Operations, intimated that ICE will request proposals to build new detention facilities.

Plans were announced for a 2,200-bed “low-custody” detention facility in Los Angeles, but the date to submit proposals has been delayed more than a month.

“I believe these people are all very sincere and have good intentions,” said Peter Michel, CEO of iSECUREtrac, a Nebraska-based company that provides ankle-monitoring technology. “It sounds like they have a pretty big mountain to climb.”

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Craig Pyes will speak about prisoner abuse by the U.S. military at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy on Tuesday, February 2, from 4-6 p.m. More info here:

More than 160 detainees have died in American military custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, many classified as homicides. But were these deaths properly investigated? Craig Pyes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose reporting launched an Army probe into two detainee deaths and their cover-up by a U.S. Special Forces team in Afghanistan, will argue that cases of homicide where abuse is suspected should be re-examined because the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID) did not vigorously pursue suspected war crimes. Pyes will discuss his own multi-year investigation of a rogue Special Forces detachment in Afghanistan that adapted harsh interrogation techniques promoted by the Pentagon, that were later judged responsible for the vast majority of prisoner abuse. Ten detainees held at the base said they had been tortured, yet questions remain unanswered about the culpability of the Special Forces team six years later, despite the decision by the U.S. Army to close the criminal investigation - not once, but three times.

Craig Pyes is a human rights investigator and an award-winning investigative reporter with extensive experience in Afghanistan and other conflict zones. As a special investigator for the non-profit Crimes of War Project, Pyes looked into possible breaches of U.S. and International law in the armed conflict in Afghanistan. While working as an investigative reporter for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, he wrote about the looming threat of the al Qaeda terrorism network both before and after the September 11th attacks on America, and profiled the corrosive and national security effects of drug corruption in Mexico. During the civil war in El Salvador, he and a colleague were the only reporters to reveal the inner workings of Salvadoran death squads that had killed more than 40,000 people with impunity. Pyes has received two Pulitzer Prizes, as well as awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Los Angeles Times, and the Latin American Studies Association. In 2002, he was a finalist for Harvard's Shorenstein Center's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Currently based in Los Angeles, he investigates human rights abuses for lawyers and non-profits, and is a court-appointed death penalty mitigation specialist.

Who is Tracey Bardorf?

John Morton, the assistant secretary for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, last summer brought on the relatively young former federal prosecutor to be his special adviser for Mexico and border matters.

Before joining ICE, Bardorf oversaw the Justice Department’s Mérida Initiative projects and implementation of the Global Trafficking in Persons program, according to her ICE Web site bio.

Now 10 years out of law school — she graduated from Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in 2000 — including a few years of corporate litigation before she joined the government, she now, presumably, has the country's top immigration and customs enforcement official’s ear. Or not.

She spent about four years as an assistant U.S. attorney in Arizona, where she handled firearms, immigration, trafficking in persons and violent crime prosecutions, according to her bio. A search of a federal courts database shows she was involved in about 400 cases before she was detailed to Mexico as the Department of Justice resident legal adviser in Mexico City.

Among her notable cases were convictions of child sex traffickers in 2008, a 2007 guilty plea from a Mexican national on aggravated identity theft and illegally re-entering the country after deportation and separate 2006 convictions of coyotes whose misguided border crossings resulted in the deaths of illegal immigrants.

In recent months, Bardorf, 35, has popped up on an American Bar Association panel in Washington D.C. in November, speaking about narco-violence along the border and emerging national security law issues, and then again late last year for a meeting between Mexican and U.S. officials in Mexico City.

Other than that, there isn't a lot of reliable information about her. So, who is Tracey Bardorf?

Bardorf is a Republican and a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. She sat on — and eventually was voted chairwoman of — Arizona’s Clean Elections panel, which monitors the state’s system for public financing of candidates, according to the commission's 2005 annual report. (She resigned in 2006 after serving two years of a five-year term when the Justice Department raised a conflict of interest objection, according to a news report.)

She is a graduate of St. Anselm College, a Catholic liberal arts college in New Hampshire, and she attended Phillips Exeter Academy. She is fluent in Spanish, German and French, and is proficient in Italian, according to the annual report.

Other than that, based on an unscientific, informal, quick survey of a handful of people, not much else is known about her. Some people had heard of her. Others hadn’t.

As far as her efforts with the $1.4 billion anti-narcotics aid package dubbed the Mérida Initiative, which has drawn criticism for being Mexico’s version of Plan Colombia and because of alleged human rights abuses by the Mexican military, there isn’t much public information.

(For more information on Mérida, see the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute).

A Government Accountability Office report released in December found that the release of funds for the Mérida Initiative was dragging, but that “a broad range of training, exchange, and technical assistance programs have been completed or initiated with the aim of strengthening the capacity of law enforcement and justice sector institutions.”

How much of that relates to the Justice Department or even Bardorf's involvement? Good question.

A Congressional Research Service report last year states that “many predict that it is likely to take much longer than three years for Mérida to help partner governments make real headway in achieving that goal" but U.S. officials "maintain that some of the most important results of Mérida thus far may be impossible to quantify, such as the increase in communication and cooperation that has developed as a result of the Initiative among U.S., Mexican, and Central American law enforcement and security officials."

Maybe that's where Bardorf comes in. But how she became one of Morton's top advisers is a question that remains unanswered. Any ideas? abecker (at) cironline (dot) org

We really had no institutional baggage to overcome when we built our California Watch team from scratch. No voices telling us, “You can’t do that.” Or, “That’s not the way we do it here.” We weren’t weighted down by the kind of intractable culture that has made it hard for lots of newsrooms across America to adjust and adapt quickly enough to a fast-changing world.

We have pretty much thrown out the old rule books. Here editors will write and report and – gasp – reporters will edit. And even crazier than that: investigative journalists are blogging – a ton. Our hard-working staff has generated close to 100 blog posts in a little more than three weeks, on top of some kick-ass stories, terrific multimedia and nearly two dozen searchable databases. If you missed it, be sure to check out the video by Mark S. Luckie about our team and mission.

In our first few months of operation, the staff of California Watch has begun to mold its own way of doing things – one that stresses innovation, ideas, and a can-do spirit. We will try new things, and we will occasionally miss the mark, but you can’t move forward without throwing out antiquated, obsolete rules and challenging the way journalists have operated. It’s one of the endearing things in our little newsroom that makes this an absolutely thrilling place to be.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

A Justice Department investigation of an immigration judge's misconduct in Florida gives a Bahamian asylum seeker another day in court.

The National Law Journal reports that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility found that Bruce Solow, an immigration judge in Miami, "engaged in professional misconduct when he acted in reckless disregard of his obligation to be fair and impartial."

In a 2005 asylum hearing Solow mocked Roscoe Campbell, who said he fled his native Bahamas for fear for his life after reporting to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration corrupt officials engaging in drug-trafficking, according to the article. Solow ordered Campbell and his family deported.

The federal appellate courts have excoriated some immigration judges for their conduct, including Anna Ho, a Los Angeles-based immigration judge.

The fact that the Justice Department's internal affairs office took a look at the judge's behavior is extraordinary, Nadine Wettstein of the American Immigration Legal Council, told the legal newspaper.

Still, there isn't a lot known about the larger issue of judicial misconduct and how the court leadership - and, by extension, the Justice Department - handles complaints. The NLJ writes:

The lack of transparency irritates attorneys and judges alike. The American Immigration Council's Wettstein and other immigration lawyers said complaints against immigration judges to the Executive Office seem to go into a "black hole," and, they added, getting notice of findings made by OPR also seems rare.

Immigration attorneys have also been reluctant, in some cases, to file complaints against certain judges because they may have to argue before the judge again.

As the NLJ article points out, the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration court system, has its own procedure for taking complaints against immigration judges and private attorneys.

The agency would not release information on the number of complaints received nor would it make public its disciplinary actions, citing privacy concerns, according to the story.

The story also makes the point that the Justice Department's process for investigating complaints against immigration judges is "neither swift nor transparent and because of that, it can be unfair -- to aliens, attorneys and immigration judges."

We're interested in learning more about the immigration courts. If you have ideas to share, please contact abecker (at) cironline (dot) org.

Reporter Mark Schapiro was interviewed by Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace on January 20th about his piece in Harper's Magazine outlining how corporations have found loopholes in the carbon cap and trade system, and how to verify those carbon credits.

In the interview, Schapiro explains there are companies that go over their emission caps every month, and know exactly by how much. They need to buy carbon credits in order to not go over their cap. The companies then turn to a developing country such as Brazil, which sells the companies the extra credits they need. All the while, the companies are doing nothing to actually reduce the amount of carbon they are emitting.

Schapiro writes about the people who measure carbon emissions and the reliability of the measurements. What is the United States going to do when we step in?

If you're sipping your mocha at a coffee shop somewhere in California on Thursday, keep an ear out for the furious tapping on the keyboard. It could be one of us blogging or tweeting, building multimedia packages or pounding out the next big story.

Members of the California Watch and Center for Investigative Reporting staffs will be fanning out around the state and working in coffee shops with WiFi access on Jan. 21 as part of our first "Open Newsroom."

Here's how the idea came about: For most of this week, our operations are being disrupted by an office move. We’re packing up and transporting the whole shebang from our existing location on Newbury Street to a beautifully remodeled landmark building on Center Street in downtown Berkeley. Our Internet connection went down Friday at our old location, and we don't have a place to sit in the new space. If you're trying to call right now, our phones are unattended, if they're plugged in at all. After the holiday today, we're mostly going to be working from home until Jan. 25 when the doors open at our new digs.

We figured we should turn this temporary inconvenience into an opportunity. So we decided to set up shop on Thursday at various WiFi hotspots.

The Open Newsroom concept is part of a goal to connect with readers and get out of the office. We’re hoping it will be a regular part of what we do. On Thursday, please stop by to say hello. We're looking forward to meeting you. And if you have any great story tips, we'll be there to listen. 

The locations and hours to find us are on the map below.

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.

We’ve gotten lots of feedback on our new California Watch site. People are commenting on the clean look and applauding the simple organization. Several readers have complemented us for the array of searchable databases on our Data Center.

I’ve also gotten some really great feedback about the way we’re making our staff more accessible to readers. Carrie Brown-Smith, a University of Memphis journalism professor, commended us for our bio pages, which include each staffer’s list of coverage priorities and some details about what they are working on – even the stories, journals or Web sites they’re reading.

We felt strongly that our reporters, multimedia producers and editors should let their personalities shine through on these pages and that it might help lift the veil on who we are and what we do.

“I just think that is incredibly smart and utilizes the research on credibility as well,” Brown-Smith wrote in an e-mail to me.

We’ve implemented other subtle innovations – including the way our reporters and a couple of other acclaimed investigative journalists have helped organize our Resources pages. Our resources are organized by topic. They serve as a guide for civic-minded citizens, students, bloggers and young journalists to conduct their own basic investigative reporting.

And we’ve also broken the traditional mold of story crediting by adding the names of our editors who work on each of our major stories. (One reader "tweeted" that it was her favorite thing about our new site.) We think it’s a way to increase accountability and credibility – and also to give props to the traditionally nameless and faceless journalists who partner with our reporters and multimedia producers on stories.

Since our site went live on Jan. 2, we've heard excellent criticisms as well. Some have worried that we’re allowing anonymous commenting, which can encourage the lunatics to dominate discussion boards (although that, thankfully, hasn't happened here). Others have expressed hope that we would allow some type of rating system of comments as a way to encourage responsible commenting. We couldn’t agree more, and we want to make this a top priority to add soon. We hoped to tackle that before our launch, but we set it aside. Too many other things needed to get done first.

We’ve also had readers tell us it's way too difficult to register to comment and to e-mail our staff. We agree. Our site was set up so that you have to be logged in as a registered user to connect with our reporting, editing and multimedia teams. We’re going to try to figure out a way to break down those barriers during the next phase of our site's development. And we're not wasting any time. We're planning to start moving ahead with a slate of enhancements and refinements in the coming weeks.

So if you would like to see changes on our site, now is a perfect time to share your thoughts.
 

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting and is now the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. Visit the Web site at www.californiawatch.org for in-depth coverage of K-12 schools, higher education, money and politics, health and welfare, public safety and the environment.