It was no accident that the impactful audio found its way to Thompson, 55, a senior reporter for ProPublica. She has spent her career following developments along the U.S.-Mexico border. Her whole life, really. An Army brat, she grew up in El Paso, Texas, the border city where her father was stationed. She learned Spanish at an early age and spent many weekends across the border in Ciudad Juárez with her friends and their families. “Living on the border,” says Thompson, “being a part of that school, and being a part of this very mixed community — military families, immigrant families, longtime Texan families — it was just a really interesting place to grow up.”



Thompson fell in love with writing and telling other people’s stories, not as a journalist but as editor of her (award-winning) high school yearbook. “We really focused,” says Thompson, who ranked second in her class. “It was more like a local reporting organization.”

A love of storytelling and a desire to travel led her into journalism. Before joining ProPublica, Thompson, who has degrees from Purdue University and George Washington University, spent 15 years at The New York Times as the Mexico City bureau chief and as an investigative reporter. Among other things, her stories have uncovered U.S. support for a Honduran military unit that kidnapped and murdered hundreds of suspected political opponents, and Washington’s role in Mexico’s fight against drug traffickers. She doesn’t seek out danger, but it has found her, and on more than one occasion she has had to talk her way out of captivity from armed criminal gangs. And it was Thompson’s daring and meticulous work in Central America that brought her to the attention of someone else.

THE STORY OF A LIFTIME

In June 2018, someone came to Jennifer Harbury, an attorney and civil rights activist based in the border town of Weslaco, Texas, seeking legal advice about how to release a tape recording they had made of the children crying in the detention center. Harbury has never publicly disclosed the identity of that whistleblower for a variety of reasons, including attorney-client privilege, but she claims it is someone she has known for years who has “extremely high credibility.” Harbury took the individual on as a client and promised to act as a go-between with journalists to ensure the tape could be made public responsibly.



And Harbury had one particular journalist in mind. “I’ve always really respected her courage,” Harbury says of Thompson, whose reporting in Central America she had long admired, even if she didn’t know Thompson personally. “She’s always been a top-notch writer who carefully checks out her stories and has tons of credibility. And she is fearless.”

After Thompson received the damning audiotape from Harbury, she immediately went into reporter mode. She knew that before the tape could be made public, it was critical to ensure that it was real and presented in the proper way. Thompson quickly set about verifying that the audio was authentic, including confirming the identity of the girl (by dialing the number the girl offers on the recording) as well as the identity of the source, that the source had access to the Border Patrol facility, and that the recording was unedited and representative of what was transpiring at the facility. Thompson, who describes herself as a perfectionist, recalls: "What was important was for me to analyze it, get the material I needed, and to get that tape up so that it might matter and mean something.”

She learned that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old, and they had only just been separated from their parents. Their emotions are raw. Those working at the facility are doing their best to comfort the children and provide them with food and toys. According to Thompson’s reporting, even the officer making a joke about the “orchestra” is doing so in a vain attempt to lighten the mood. But he can’t. The kids are inconsolable.

Thompson worked most of the weekend on the story. She barely changed out of her pajamas. Shortly after her story was published, she recalls taking a shower when she heard the tape being played on television. She had listened to the tape a dozen times in order to write about it. But she hadn’t let it sink in. “It was the first time I really heard the tape as Ginger the human being, and not Ginger the reporter,” she says, “and that’s when the sounds of those voices began to really affect me.”

"ABSOLUTELY GUT-WRENCHING & BEYOND DISTURBING"

Thompson was not the only one stirred by the tape. “Heartbreaking,” New York Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat and Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner tweeted about the recording after the release of Thompson’s story. “Absolutely gut-wrenching & beyond disturbing,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat. Most Americans, including members of Congress, had known for weeks about the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which had separated more than 2,300 children from their parents since that April, and it had been condemned from all sides. The American Academy of Pediatrics argued the policy would cause the children “irreparable harm.” Former first lady Laura Bush called it “cruel” and “immoral.”



But it wasn’t until Thompson’s story and the release of the audio that the horrifying human consequences of the border drama grabbed America by the collar. The resulting public sentiment and political pressure forced the administration to announce that it would end its child separation policy and attempt to reunify those who had already been separated. “I was very heartened that people on both sides of the political divide were horrified when they heard the tape,” says Harbury, “and stood up immediately and said, ‘No way. That’s going too far.’”