NEWSWELL’s team keeps growing, this time with a new California-wide immigration reporter. Lillian Perlmutter joins our newsrooms after working as an independent journalist in Mexico City, where she wrote for news outlets and magazines including Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times and The New Republic.
Perlmutter, a California native, earned her bachelor’s degree in politics and foreign languages from Scripps College. She’s returned to California to join our efforts to rethink local news.
As NEWSWELL’s first organization-wide beat reporter, she’s now based in San Diego. She focuses on investigative reporting on immigration issues to serve all our California newsrooms: Stocktonia, the Santa Barbara News-Press and Times of San Diego.
How did you come to cover immigration as a beat, and why is the subject important now?
I began covering immigration in 2022, when I was a reporter based in Mexico City. Waves of thousands of asylum seekers from all over the world were arriving at the Mexican border with Guatemala, on their way to the United States. I would follow these caravans to the U.S. border, where I began reporting on restrictive asylum policies and law enforcement actions against migrants.
Immigration is one of the most important stories playing out in the current political moment, as the Trump administration seeks to make immigrants’ lives the arena of a larger battle over legal principles. Millions of people are affected by recent changes in policy, such as a self-described quota for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to make 3,000 arrests per day.
What do readers want to know about immigration, and what do you think people need to know that they might not know already?
Readers want to know how they or someone they know could be affected by policies, but also, how immigrants in their communities are grappling with new realities. In the age of the doomscroll, readers want to be informed about the patterns of immigration enforcement in their local areas, where they are most likely to have a voice.
Whether or not people agree with the new efforts to increase deportations, they should know that the majority of people arrested by ICE in California since January had no criminal record. Some are asylum seekers who came to the United States fleeing violence in their home countries.
In the last week, we also helped readers learn more about another effect of these enforcement efforts: how more U.S. citizens are also being arrested.
Tell us something that surprised you or interested you about your first stories here at NEWSWELL.
My first few weeks in San Diego have been marked by a pattern of ICE arrests outside elementary schools. Federal officials consistently tell us these arrests didn’t happen at schools. But when there’s a highly visible arrest — as with one man who was marched away by agents after dropping off his daughter at elementary school two blocks away — educators and others say it sows fear in their community.
What kind of reporting can we expect to see from you next?
My goal is to answer readers’ questions about immigration enforcement through effective storytelling. This means following the stories of people whose experiences reveal a larger reality about the changing atmosphere in immigration. I’ll cover not only deportations, but also changes in immigrant communities, labor conditions for migrants, surveillance, detention centers and much more.
By investing in dedicated beat reporters like Lillian, NEWSWELL is working to ensure Californians have trustworthy immigration coverage they need at a pivotal moment.
This update originally appeared in our Aug. 26, 2025, newsletter, which came from Josh Susong, director of investigative journalism. This version has been lightly edited for clarity.