Erin Siegal McIntyre is an American investigative journalist, photographer and academic. For about a decade she reported from Tijuana, Mexico; since 2020 she has taught journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Latino USA.
Notebook
Guatemala City and Washington · 1987–2010
The U.S. Embassy Cables: Adoption Fraud in Guatemala, 1987–2010
Document volume, published 2011
Through more than thirty Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department, Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the CIA, she obtained more than 700 pages of U.S. Embassy records. The cables show that U.S. officials knew of fraud in Guatemalan adoptions for years, including lawyers arranging adoptions of kidnapped children and women paid to pose as mothers giving up a child.
Guatemala and the United States · 2008–2012
Book, Beacon Press, 2012
The investigation began as her master's project at Columbia University on organized crime and corruption in international adoption. The book follows a girl taken into an adoption ring in Guatemala and the two mothers searching for her, and exposes fraudulent, criminal and corrupt practices in adoption between Guatemala and the United States.
Tijuana · 2012–2014
Removed: The Realities of Deportation
Fronteras Desk public radio; Soros Justice Fellowship
With Beth Caldwell and Joel Medina she held a 2012 Soros Justice Fellowship to report on what mandatory, permanent deportation does to individuals, families and communities. The reporting included "Children Left Behind: Deported Parents, American Kids" (2013) and the Fronteras Desk series on parents and children, some of them American citizens, split by deportation.
Mexico's southern border · 2014
Is rape the price to pay for migrant women chasing the American Dream?
Fusion, with Deborah Bonello
The report looked at sexual assault on Central American women and girls crossing Mexico toward the United States. Directors of migrant shelters put the share raped on the way at 80 percent. The attackers include coyotes, other migrants, bandits and government officials.
U.S.–Mexico border · 1975–2023
The Border Patrol's Fearless 5%
Reveal, May 2023, with Anayansi Diaz-Cortes
For decades women have made up about 5 percent of Border Patrol agents. Starting from the first class of women admitted in 1975, she interviewed current and former agents and reviewed lawsuits and complaints alleging sexual harassment and assault, and put the findings to former Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan.
Artesia, New Mexico · 2019–2024
He's an Agent. No One Will Believe Me Over Him.
Mother Jones, August 2024
Using Artesia Police Department dispatch records obtained by public records request, she traced a rape reported at the Border Patrol Academy in September 2019. A previously unreleased CBP list of 186 sexual misconduct allegations over about 20 years left out some known cases that ended in convictions; about five years later CBP said the Artesia case was still open.
