Reporting with One Hand Tied

A new report documents a hostile environment for US journalists this year, with 32 arrests and 170 assaults.

On January 18, two days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as president for the second time, Matthew Kaplan, a freelance photojournalist, was arrested and detained while covering an anti-deportation protest in Gary, Indiana. Kaplan said police grabbed him from behind without warning. He was charged with criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, and resisting law enforcement, all of which were dropped two months later. “I don’t really like myself being the story,” he said at the time. “I thought I was just covering a march. I didn’t think I was going to be covering police action or my own arrest.”

Kaplan didn’t let his arrest deter his reporting. And it wasn’t his last brush with law enforcement. Seven months later, on September 26, he covered a demonstration outside an ICE facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview. The center faced allegations of inhumane conditions, the AP reported, such as a lack of food and water and overcrowding so severe that detainees couldn’t sleep. Protesters that day filled the air with the sound of guitars, drums, and megaphones; ICE agents fired back with chemical-weapon dispensers. “Through the worst of the chemical attacks, a group of musicians kept playing and drumming and chanting,” Kaplan said. A guitar, he saw, was smashed by a rubber bullet. While working, Kaplan got shot in the hip with multiple pepper balls. He photographed the moment an ICE agent fired on him through a metal fence. It was a strange sight: a blue-sky day and seventy-seven degrees, yet it looked like he’d been hit with a snowball. His clothes and camera were splashed with a white-powder irritant.