In a rural town in south Georgia, sits “El Refugio,” a charming white home with green shutters. For 15 years, thousands have walked through its doors during the hardest moments of their lives. The house serves as a refuge for families of immigrants detained just two miles away at one of the largest immigration detention centers in the U.S.. In recent months, the visits to El Refugio have skyrocketed. We spent 48 hours inside El Refugio, the only hospitality house of its kind in the nation. We meet volunteers who visit with detainees and the families of those held at Stewart Detention Center.

Orgullosa and her daughter, Estrella, began to rebuild their lives after they were separated in the U.S.-Mexico border under the first Trump administration in 2018. Seven years later, Trump was re-elected, and their story took a downward spiral. They were “unlawfully deported” back to Honduras, despite having legal protection to be in the U.S. In this episode, we hear from Orgullosa about the months leading up to her deportation, the harassment she experienced from ICE, and how she’s part of a broader court filing trying to bring families like hers back to the U.S.

“The hunting of Latinos.” That’s how the mayor of Los Angeles described the last few months of increasingly violent immigration raids. They’re the brainchild of a Border Patrol chief who went rogue. In response, these tactics have created a swell of anti-ICE pushback, including from the highest levels of government, and support for the communities affected. With politicians running up against the full force of the federal government – with the backing of the Supreme Court – community is what protects you.

This is a special collaboration with CalMatters.

Thousands of immigrant children were separated from their parents at the border during the first Trump administration. And while a court ruled the government should reunite these families, hundreds still remain apart. In this episode, we travel to Guatemala to meet a father who was deported from the U.S. without his 14-year-old son. In theory the families should be able to reunify on U.S. soil. Lawyers and advocates are working tirelessly to track down missing families. But in practice, the new Trump administration is making these reunifications even more complicated.

She was in labor, fainted, and woke up in handcuffs. In El Salvador, nearly 200 women have been incarcerated in the last 26 years after having obstetric emergencies, like miscarriages and stillbirths. Maria Hinojosa and producer Monica Morales-Garcia travel to the country to speak with women who have been incarcerated under El Salvador’s anti-abortion laws, some of the strictest in the world. Through interviews, documents, and archival materials, this investigation paints a clear and disturbing picture of the women who suffer most when a country stretches the definition of abortion beyond its meaning and then bans them all without exception.

As the planet hits record-breaking carbon emissions, the race is on to slash CO2 levels—and a controversial technology called carbon capture and storage is getting pushed as a fix. At first glance, carbon capture and storage sounds like a great idea: trap carbon before it hits the air and stash it underground. But while politicians and private companies call it a climate solution, critics say it’s just a way to keep fossil fuels alive, propped up by taxpayer money. Futuro Investigates traveled to California’s Central Valley —a place already struggling with extreme air pollution— and that is now ground zero for carbon capture projects. Here, locals are asking: will this technology save the planet or is it just another way for oil companies to avoid accountability while others pay the price?

For months, Futuro Investigates in collaboration with Latino USA, tracked how lies and conspiracies about the election and the candidates that originated in English soon found their way to Spanish-speaking audiences, amid the expanded monetization of tech platforms and the rise of technologies like AI. We meet face to face with social media influencers pushing out misinformation in Spanish, and with the experts combating it.

True crime meets telenovela in this five-episode audio series, as two journalists share their obsession with a powerful and obscure character whose role in the so-called war on drugs has affected millions of lives in the United States.

After a Latino family was prevented from applying for a mortgage in New Jersey, Futuro Investigates began digging into mortgage application outcomes in the state. Our investigation determined Latinos are more likely to be denied mortgage loans than white borrowers.

A warming planet is creating a booming and loosely-regulated disaster restoration industry fueled by immigrant labor. Without protection, workers are exposed to lethal toxins making them sick long after the cleanup.

 Maria Hinojosa teams up with Zeba Warsi, and they investigate how women in ICE detention are sexually abused when they were at their most vulnerable — in a medical setting — and how ICE has done very little to stop it. 

For the past year, since the Uvalde school shooting, Futuro Investigates have been documenting the community’s trauma and the fight over assault rifles. Our team examines the police response, Uvalde’s history of struggle and healing.

Even though carbon monoxide poisoning is preventable, housing safety violations, injuries and deaths keep occurring. Since Fall 2022, Futuro Investigates digs into why incidents keep happening and how Latino and Black residents are disproportionally affected by the deadly gas.

In 2018, Diego and Mario joined the U.S. government-sponsored H-2A visa program, leaving their families in their home country of Mexico to harvest blueberries at a farm in North Carolina for six months. They had no idea they were about to become victims of human trafficking and that their lives would be derailed forever. Listen to the two part special Head Down now.

For over a year, Futuro Investigates has dug into how the Border Patrol’s decades-long “prevention through deterrence” policies have purposely created a deadly funnel, pushing migrants attempting to cross from Mexico to the U.S. into the deadliest terrain in the country.