How “The Wait” went from a piece on tortured people to a tortuous process
Story produced by Noah Caldwell, Joseph Jaafari and Lisa Thomson for the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and the NYCity News Service.
Here’s what you need to know:
Asylum seekers have a unique, and often disadvantaged, status within the U.S. immigration system. While refugees apply for resettlement ahead of time, and are placed within communities by a federal program, asylum seekers show up unannounced at a border or port of entry, often alone and without a community to welcome them. They claim asylum at that border crossing, and are either let into the U.S. while their application is considered, or detained while an immigration judge reviews their case.
WHERE THE IDEA CAME FROM
When Lisa, Noah and I first partnered up to work on an investigative piece, we knew exactly that we wanted to focus on torture victims within the United States. It was actually one of those rare moments where we all must have read the same article or watched the same episode of “Homeland.” But during our first meeting, we all unanimously said we wanted to look at what it was like being a torture survivor in America.
Though noble in our pursuit, the challenge of finding people who wanted to speak as a torture survivor was arduous. People would come out of the woodworks, then disappear. And nonprofit organizations that specialized in torture victims wanted to protect the identities of victims.
Even worse, there is very little research and data on torture victims. The only thing we could initially come across was the number of torture victims in the U.S. and where they were concentrated (in Glendale, California).
However, there was one factoid that stood out which gave us a bit more insight into how we could shape our story: majority of torture victims in America came here through the asylum process.
That’s when we decided to look into what these people’s experiences were coming into the states as torture survivors.
WHAT WE NEEDED TO SHOW
There were some basic numbers we had to collect (how many asylum seekers were coming into the U.S., how many were already here, how many suffered from torture) and there were processes we needed to figure out, such as:
- what was the system like?
- what were the problems with the system?
- was there easy access to that system?
We found that those who came into the asylum process had already suffered from acute stress levels and mental trauma. Noah was able to find the researcher who was conducting the first-ever study focused on torture survivors and asylum seekers within the U.S. and we were able to gather some great numbers on how many suffer from PTSD and acute mental health problems.
Through just some cursory research we found that in order to be considered for asylum people needed to go through an interview process which required documentation and proof that the person needed asylum, such as physical documents proving torture or death threats from the government, etc.
That interview process seemed difficult, especially for asylum seekers; how could someone, likely from an area where people going missing is not uncommon and even less likely to have been documented, provide that kind of documentation? And on top of it all, the government’s waiting periods at each office seemed ridiculously long — in some cases up to three and a half years.
So, we wanted to make that impact known to our audience and wanted to show people what it really meant to be someone who had to wait for so long for an interview.
HOW WE SHOWED IT
The first item we built was a calculator that showed users how long they would have to wait and the distance to their closest interview location based on their zip code. The idea was simple enough: put in a zip code, and then text would appear showing exactly how far away the user was from the office and the estimated wait time for an interview at that location.
We also wanted to show how much money it could cost to get to that location based on where you were, but that required an intuitive system that would be able to look at your distance to the office, pair that with your wait time and check flight or train prices that far out. Also, the wait times in some cases were so far in the future, planes and cost for booking wouldn’t be available.
To stick with just zip codes, we gathered all the zip codes in the nation and organized them into a spreadsheet.
From there, we had a second spreadsheet with columns of:
- office location
- location ID number and
- respective estimated wait time associated with the location
We stored that data in CartoDB and used SQL to merge the two spreadsheets based on the ID. Using Google’s Map API we are able calculate the radius of the Earth and give the distance in miles.
