{"id":16919,"date":"2026-03-13T12:54:47","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T12:54:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/?p=16919"},"modified":"2026-03-13T13:10:04","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T13:10:04","slug":"how-stephen-rodrick-prepared-for-his-story-about-ice-occupying-a-small-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2026\/03\/13\/how-stephen-rodrick-prepared-for-his-story-about-ice-occupying-a-small-town\/","title":{"rendered":"How Stephen Rodrick prepared for his story about ICE occupying a small town"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter,<\/em><\/a> delivered every Friday in your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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***<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Dear Storyboard community: <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Journalist Stephen Rodrick<\/a> is a proud generalist: He has written about everyone and everything from a scandal-plagued CEO<\/a> to the Hollywood actor publicly feuding with his daughter<\/a>, and personal topics including the toxic disaster in his hometown of Flint, Michigan<\/a>, and his Navy pilot father Peter, who died in a plane crash when Stephen was 13<\/a>, in his own memoir \u201cThe Magical Stranger.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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For his latest story, Rodrick, a senior writer for Rolling Stone for the past eight years, traveled to the town of Shakopee, Minn. (population: 47,158)<\/a>, to cover ICE’s continued occupation inside the state. Rodrick said he was laid out with the flu for much of January, so he was arriving in Minnesota \u201clate.\u201d \u201cA lot of really talented people had already written about it,\u201d he told me in an email interview. But whereas normally Rodrick says each new story means \u201cstarting at zero\u201d with his sourcing, \u201cfor only the third or fourth time in my career, I already had sources in Minnesota from stories I’d done on Tim Walz<\/a> and Melissa Hortman<\/a>, the murdered House speaker.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I made some calls and spoke to activists and leaders I’d met along the way. One of them was Brad Tabke, the state rep from Shakopee, who I had met on the Hortman story. At that point, I had no idea that ICE was hitting so hard in the second ring of Minneapolis suburbs where suburbs bleed into farmland. He told me some stories about what he was seeing on the ground and I decided to fly out two days later. From there, it was the proverbial peeling of the onion, he gave me five people to talk to and then they gave me five more people. I’d earned his trust writing about his friend Melissa, so he felt confident putting me in touch with victims of ICE raids and stops and that I’d handle their stories with dignity and restraint.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In many ways, all journalists are generalists, even when they have a beat. Our job is to be curious “normies,\u201d (in the words of Drew Harwell<\/a>). And sometimes I wonder if “starting at zero\u201d on a story gives journalists a level of humility that requires them to be even more careful in how they report and write. As Rodrick says, \u201clike the reader, you’re entering a new world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I asked Rodrick about how he prepared for a reporting trip as intense as this one, and how he managed his time when he arrived in town: <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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I was in Shakopee for 15 days, which gave me time to fall into the rhythm, if you want to call it that, of the terror people were feeling on a day-to-day basis. It also gave me time to not have to pack too many interviews into individual days. I say this with the full understanding that my trauma was 0.00001 [percent] of what the people of Shakopee experienced, but I want to be a good listener. Talking to two or three people, back-to-back, who had guns pointed at them Ieft me pretty shattered and I felt fortunate that I could catch my breath in the evening and regroup for the next day. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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I’m not a guy who prides himself on not getting emotionally involved in his stories, and I wept many times in those two weeks, a combination of reacting to the stories I was hearing, but also a clench-your-fists fury that this was being projected as \u201cgoing after the worst of the worst,\u201d but in reality ICE was stopping high school kids and house cleaning grandmothers. Marvin Gaye’s line, \u201cMakes me wanna holler, throw up both my hands\u201d ran through my head repeatedly.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n \n

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I felt guilty leaving after two weeks, there were more people I could have talked to, more things I could have witnessed firsthand, but I missed my kid and my wife. Sadly, I have the feeling what happened in Shakopee will happen again. So it goes.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Read more from Rodrick in the Rolling Stone archives<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Links of note<\/h2>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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