True stories from the rumor mill
Necessity is the mother of invention, and Jackson Heights needs facts. Enter Project Rosie.
It was mid February 2017 when everyone — and I mean everyone — in Jackson Heights got the warning, whether by email or text or Twitter: federal agents were at the corner of Junction Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue, under the elevated subway tracks, rounding up undocumented immigrants.
I didn’t want to believe it. Would the nation’s newly inaugurated president sic his immigration officers on New York City so soon after taking the oath of office? I mean, he’d already blocked some foreign travelers from entering the country through its airports — would he swoop down on foreign-born residents in their own neighborhoods?
I had to see for myself whether the information was true. So I walked down Roosevelt Avenue at 9 o’clock on that unseasonably warm Saturday night, nearly 2 miles eastward from 74th Street to Junction Boulevard, and I saw … nothing. No immigration agents in black flak vests (at least that’s how I imagined them), no passenger vans with gated windows and powder-blue federal license plates. Nothing.
But other things were absent too. There were no smokers lounging outside the many bars on Roosevelt Avenue, no cumbia music blaring from the nightclubs. The lights were off and security gates rolled down at nearly every restaurant. And on an avenue usually lined with all-night taco carts on every corner, there were next to none.
Where the hell did everybody go? Jackson Heights was an urban neighborhood of nearly 65,000 people — two thirds of them immigrants — yet the only people on Roosevelt Avenue that Saturday night were me and an elderly, unlicensed food vendor selling corn cobs off an hibachi grill.
That was the big clue. That unlicensed vendor (quite possibly an undocumented immigrant) should have been the first one off the street if law enforcement officers were hauling people off. Yet there she sat on the curb, sagging chin in wrinkled hand, as the fading embers in her hibachi sent corn cobs up in smoke.
There was no roundup on Roosevelt Avenue. It was a false alarm. But the panic it created in Jackson Heights was real. Everyone — and I mean everyone — who got the warning that night had gone into hiding.
Another warning arrived with the new work week: immigration officers were inspecting the elevated 7 train, demanding proof of citizenship from commuters as they rode above Roosevelt Avenue.
I didn’t ride the 7 train regularly and couldn’t confirm the information myself, but I knew someone who might: a former coworker and an editor whom I trusted to discern fact from fiction. He boarded the 7 train daily at its eastern terminus in Flushing and might have witnessed unusual activity during the ride, so I contacted him via Facebook Messenger.
As it turned out, he didn’t take the subway into Manhattan that morning. But connecting with him instantly via Messenger, and asking him to report conditions on the train with the immediacy of rumor, gave me an idea: could an army of editors commuting on the 7 train throughout the day fact check conditions in real time and relay them to me? Could they extinguish panic before it grew into an all-consuming inferno?
Maybe. There were just a couple of kinks in the system. First, I didn’t have an army of editors at my disposal. Instead, I’d have to rely on a network of witnesses who may not recognize the effects of bias and heightened anxiety on their reporting.
Secondly, I didn’t know how to pose the question to these witnesses. If I asked whether they’d seen immigration officers on the subway, might that stoke further fear? And if I oversimplified the question so as not to mention law enforcement activity, would that disqualify the transparency that I owed them as a journalist? The answer to both questions was yes.
Most of all, this endeavor required a lot of trust from the people who lived and worked in Jackson Heights, as they would be the contributors and the ultimate end users of the information gathered. It was a trust I hadn’t earned yet. Not before the weekend, anyway.
The tense workweek stumbled into Saturday amid new warnings from the grapevine: immigration officers were prowling Roosevelt Avenue at 74th Street. Again I walked the neighborhood in search of proof, and again I found nothing but shuttered shops and empty streets. Everyone had gone into hiding. Again.
So was this going to be my new Sisyphean lot in life — to wander the streets of Jackson Heights every weekend, looking for ghosts? Did this exercise offer any value to my community? I mean, seriously, how was this even journalism?
And how long could my neighbors stay in hiding — a week, a month, the next four years? How many would burrow further underground, and how many would just leave? How much economic damage would their absence inflict on the shops and restaurants along Roosevelt Avenue? How much business was already lost?
The residents of Jackson Heights, citizens and non-citizens alike, were gripped with fear like flies in amber, and every weekend seemed to unleash another presidential order and a fresh new hell. No one knew what rights they had anymore, and things happened so fast that there was no time to assess anything.
The neighborhood needed facts to chip away at the amber, to replace panic with a sense of agency. I want Rosie to do just that.
