The TRiiBE is part of a collaborative of newsrooms across Chicago collecting videos of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents detaining people, using force or using stop-and-frisk tactics.
The collaborative includes Block Club Chicago, Injustice Watch, the Invisible Institute, Lumpen Radio, the Investigative Project on Race and Equity, Cicero Independiente, South Side Weekly, Borderless Magazine, the Chicago Reader and The TRiiBE.
Residents who want to send in a video can share their footage at tinyurl.com/chicagojournalists. For additional questions about the process, you can contact the collaborative at chicagojournalists@protonmail.com
The video collection collaboration comes as a call for transparency and accountability following reports of federal agents violating the civil rights of observers, witnesses and journalists during President Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement takeovers and troop deployments in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles.
“We see a proliferation of misinformation about raids in a divided social media landscape; we see an urgent need for reporters across Chicago to be in conversation and relationship with each other to develop stronger safety plans and to strengthen each other’s reporting,” said Maira Khwaja, director of public strategy at Invisible Institute. “When [Illinois Gov.] JB Pritzker calls on the public to send their video to the media, we want sources to feel confident sharing with a variety of local newsrooms that will take privacy and fact-checking very seriously.”
Sebastián Hidalgo, a Chicago-based photographer and journalist who is spending a year as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, said he was inspired to crowdsource videos after a project he did as a reporting fellow for the civic journalism lab, City Bureau. Hidalgo documented the treatment of day laborers at a Home Depot on Chicago’s Southwest Side in 2024.
“Part of the challenges in the reporting was documenting the abuse in what experts called ‘invisible incidents,’ prosecuting cases by off-duty officers working security without video evidence,” Hidalgo said. “I shared photography skills with day laborers and the investigation sparked a federal lawsuit that’s still ongoing. That piece was on to something and we are expanding on it now as a group here.”
Khwaja said that many reporters and publications are interested in documenting the activity of federal agents because they have not been transparent and it’s “difficult to obtain information from” the federal government. She also sees the collaboration as local newsrooms in Chicago pooling together around shared ethics.
“These local newsrooms, and a handful of freelance reporters, are grounded in the communities we cover and share a similar set of values about being nimble and responsive to our communities’ needs, and try to complement each other’s strengths whenever we work together,” Khwaja said. “We have built relationships and trust with each other organically over a variety of co-reporting collaborations in the past five-plus years, and in particular, discussed reporter safety practices together routinely in the lead up to the [Democratic National Convention] last summer.”
