Tina Vasquez is a 2020-21 Ida B. Wells Southern Fellow and a North Carolina-based movement journalist with more than 10 years of experience reporting on immigration, reproductive injustice, LGBTQ+ issues, and gender-based violence. She is currently a senior staff writer leading The Counter’s coverage of immigration. Previously, she was a senior reporter covering gender and labor at Prism, a non-profit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. Her work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, NPR, The Nation, Playboy, the Washington Post, and a variety of other publications. She serves on the board of Press On, a Southern journalism collective that strengthens and expands the practice of journalism in service of liberation.
Poultry plants, many of which rely on immigrant labor, already had high rates of occupational illness. Then the pandemic made everything worse.