How we reported the Garcia Lopez family’s story

I met Jasmine Garcia Lopez for the first time Nov. 24, 2025 — just five days after her dad, Misael, had been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. 

After messaging back and forth on Instagram, she agreed to meet with me and former Lookout Eugene-Springfield photojournalist Isaac Wasserman, at the now-closed El Charro Mexican Restaurant off Royal Avenue in Eugene. She wanted to tell the story of her dad and the morning he was taken away.

Interviewing people in the middle of a crisis is one of the hardest and most delicate parts of being a journalist. This particular crisis, a father swept up in a local surge of immigration enforcement, was unlike anything I had covered. I worried about making an already unbearable week even harder.

We talked for about 30 minutes. Jasmine sat across the table. 

She described Misael’s warmth, his work ethic and his sense of humor, choking up as she talked about his love of birds. Anger surfaced as she recounted the morning he was arrested. Fear took over when she talked about what might come next. 

The basket of chips and salsa between us went untouched. 

I wrote what Jasmine shared, and that story was published a couple of days later. But Isaac and I felt the real story had yet to be written. 

So much was still unknown. What would happen to Misael? What would happen to Jasmine? Her baby? Jasmine was pregnant with her first child. The Garcia Lopez family is woven into Eugene: children born here and educated in Bethel schools, parents working for local employers, including at the Oregon Country Fair each summer. I knew our readers would have the same questions I did. And rarely, I felt, did I see stories that followed families upended by ICE for long enough to answer them. 

“It’s just kind of like a wait and see now,” Jasmine said in that first November interview. 

So that’s exactly what we did.

We checked in every few weeks. Sometimes Jasmine had news — a hearing had been scheduled, a call had come from her dad. Sometimes she didn’t. 

I had yet to speak with Misael because he was in an ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington. So in the meantime, I set out to map the legal landscape of his case in the other ways I knew how, reviewing court records and speaking with immigration attorneys. Documents would answer one question and raise another. In the Trump administration’s immigration system, there was rarely a simple answer, I learned.

In January, a two-month period of waiting and uncertainty for the Garcia Lopez family came sharply to an end. Within a dizzying few weeks, Misael’s bond was denied and he was sent back to Mexico. 

Isaac and I visited the family’s home in Bethel every couple of weeks. We met Jasmine’s mother, brothers and dogs. Her mom was afraid to leave the house for fear of encountering ICE, but she welcomed us inside. We dashed out of one visit early to cover a protest at downtown Eugene’s federal building against federal agents’ killing of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti.

Jasmine helped translate for us. Her mom and dad don’t speak much English, and we didn’t speak much Spanish. Communication was sometimes awkward and, for me, embarrassing. I often thought, Why the hell did I take French in high school? Without Jasmine’s help, the language barrier would have made the story nearly impossible to report.

Good stories exist because sources, somehow, trust journalists to tell them. That was true the afternoon we sat down with Jasmine at El Charro. It was true when she texted us updates from her dad in detention. It was true when he was separated from her and the rest of his Eugene family by an international border.

The Garcia Lopez family kept saying “yes.” Each “yes” meant trusting a stranger with a little more of their lives, often reliving memories they wish they could forget. But they recognized the value of sharing their family’s story, and they never seemed to doubt that we could tell it right. That trust became the foundation of the story, and my main driving force as the reporter.

Perhaps the family’s biggest “yes” came later in January, when we set up our first-ever WhatsApp call with Misael. We had never spoken with him, and he was just beginning to adjust to life back in Mexico. 

I wondered if he would grant us the same trust his family did. I told him I might ask him some uncomfortable questions about his past. He promised there was nothing he wouldn’t tell us, for he had nothing to hide.

Then Isaac pitched the idea: What if we visited Misael in Mexico? 

We couldn’t visualize the place he was living, much less describe it to readers, if we had never seen it with our own eyes. 

We asked, and Misael said “yes.” 

If we traveled to Mexico, he said, we’d be “hermanos de la corazón”: brothers of the heart. 

The next month, Isaac and I found ourselves standing in Santa Ana Ahuehuepan, the small town in central Mexico where Misael had returned after nearly two decades. 

We walked the streets he grew up on, met the relatives who welcomed him home and saw the unfinished house where he planned to live.

Lookout hired guide/interpreters for the trip, Manuel Bayo Gisbert and Cristopher Rogel Blanquet, who helped bridge the language barrier. Still, many moments passed by me entirely. I found myself paying closer attention than ever to faces, gestures and pauses, trying to understand conversations long before I could understand the words. Even then, the trip answered questions a phone call couldn’t. 

When it came time to write, I had to figure out how to put more than six months of reporting into words. My first draft was 10,000 words. Then I cut it in half. Then I added stuff back. There were moments and details that mattered deeply, to the family and to me, that ultimately didn’t make it on the page.

I hope this story helps explain what happens after an ICE arrest in our community — the waiting, the legal churn, the separation and the impossible choices families have to make. The Garcia Lopez family’s many “yeses” made that story possible. I’m grateful they trusted us to tell it.