Education Resource

Meet the Journalists: Tim Sullivan & Cedar Attanasio

For the first time since World War II, the U.S. government is turning away thousands of asylum seekers from around the world, regardless of their need for refuge. The Trump administration’s immigration rule changes have effectively sealed the border to most of those people, leaving them in a Mexican limbo and shifting responsibility for U.S. immigration policy to the Mexican government and dozens of shelters there. In a Juarez shelter called El Buen Pastor, an Associated Press team—reporters Tim Sullivan and Cedar Attanasio, and photographer Gregory Bull—spent more than a week trying to understand how these policies were affecting people on the ground. What they found after moving into the shelter was a complicated community forged by people from Honduras to Uganda, and a shelter that often ripples with often-unspoken bigotries. It’s a place where daily life is marked by brutal summer heat, occasional dust storms, and the guilt of mothers who can’t afford dinner for their children. But it’s also a place of home-cooked food, young romance, and Scrabble games that seem to stretch into eternity. Anything to make the time pass.