Seth Freed Wessler

Journalist

Seth Freed Wessler is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary maker.

Seth Freed Wessler

Journalist

Seth Freed Wessler is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary maker.

Featured
The Border Where Different Rules Apply
Since the summer of 2021, the U.S. Coast Guard has intercepted surging numbers of migrants. Most of them are fleeing political turmoil and violence in Haiti and Cuba. Nearly everyone is sent back. Some are children. Increasingly, they are traveling alone.
ProPublica/The New York Times Magazine
Featured
Developers Found Graves in the Virginia Woods. Authorities Then Helped Erase the Historic Black Cemetery.
The cemetery’s disappearance cleared the way for the expansion of a Microsoft data center, despite layers of federal and state regulations nominally intended to protect culturally significant sites. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abu
ProPublica
Army Corps of Engineers to Order New Study of Grain Elevator That Could Harm Black Heritage Sites
Following our reporting, a federal agency says that a proposed grain elevator in Louisiana could harm a historic plantation and asks why a report was changed to minimize discussion of possible damage.
ProPublica
Featured
She Warned the Grain Elevator Would Disrupt Sacred Black History. They Deleted Her Findings.
A whistleblower says a plan to build a grain elevator on an old plantation would disrupt important historic sites, including possibly unmarked graves of enslaved people, and that her cultural resource management firm tried to bury her findings.
ProPublica
Featured
The Facility
A documentary film: Detained inside an infamous American detention center as the pandemic spreads, a group of immigrants organize in protest to demand protection and their release. Separated from their families, and fearing for their lives, they take bold action. But officials who run the detention center are intent on keeping these men and women silent, and keeping them locked up.
Field of Vision
Featured
Eugene Clemons May Be Ineligible for the Death Penalty. A Rigid Clinton-Era Law Could Force Him to Be Executed Anyway
His lawyers presented no defense at trial. Then a clerk’s office misplaced a plea for his civil rights behind a file cabinet. Now, it’s almost impossible for the federal courts to address the problems with his case.
ProPublica
Featured
Cold as ICE: How Local Sheriffs Are Driving Trump’s Deportation Agenda
“I believe that the goal of the current sheriff and others is to keep out immigrants, to keep Gwinnett County homogeneously white and conservative.”
Mother Jones
Featured
Immigrants Say They Were Pressured Into Unneeded Surgeries
Wendy Dowe was startled awake early one morning in January 2019, when guards called her out of her cellblock in the Irwin County immigration detention center in rural Georgia, where she had been held for four months. She would be having surgery that day, they said. Still groggy, the 48-year-old immigrant from Jamaica, who had been living without legal status in the United States for two decades before she was picked up by immigration authorities, felt a swell of dread come over her.
The New York Times
Featured
Fear, Illness and Death in ICE Detention: How a Protest Grew on the Inside
Life and protest inside an ICE detention center during the pandemic.
The New York Times Magazine
Featured
Last Chance at Justice
History tells us that, in a time of crisis, we have to be careful about how we respond. At the start of the Iraq War in 2003, Salah al-Ejaili was working as a journalist when the U.S. military detained him inside Abu Ghraib, a prison that would become notorious for American abuses committed in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In this episode, one man's pursuit to get justice 17 years after the war began.
WNYC Studios & Reveal
Featured
Inside the US Marshals’ Secretive, Deadly Detention Empire
A federal detention empire is flying under the radar—and so are the deaths on its watch.
Mother Jones
Featured
Is Denaturalization the Next Front in the Trump Administration’s War on Immigration?
The Justice Department has made denaturalizing US citizens a “strategic objective." Officials call the targets "fraudsters" and “nefarious actors." I looked into early cases and that's not what I found. Meet Odette Dureland and Abdo Wasel.
New York Times Magazine
Featured
Marshals' Lawlessness
NPR's Latino USA brings you a first-ever look into the sprawling detention system run by the U.S. Marshals. The agency's detention population has ballooned since the Trump administration started criminally prosecuting nearly everyone caught crossing the border without papers. But the Marshals Service has failed to make sure its detainees are held in safe conditions—even after hundreds of people have died on its watch. In a yearlong investigation with Mother Jones and Type Investigations, Latino USA uncovers the stories behind these deaths.
NPR
Featured
The Coast Guard’s ‘Floating Guantánamos’
The open waters between Ecuador and Colombia, from which Jhonny Arcentales departed. Glenna Gordon for The New York Times. On nights when the November rain poured down and he had not slept at all, Jhonny Arcentales had visions of dying, of his body being cast into the dark ocean. He would imagine his wife and their teenage son tossing his clothes into a pit in a cemetery and gathering at the local church for his funeral.
The New York Times Magazine
Featured
Costs of the Confederacy
In the last decade alone, American taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate monuments and groups that perpetuate racist ideology.
Smithsonian
Featured
Monumental Lies
The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago, but the Confederacy didn’t completely die with it. Monuments, shrines and museums are found throughout the South. We teamed up with The Investigative Fund to visit dozens of them and found that for devoted followers they inspire a disturbing – and distorted – view of history: Confederate generals as heroes.
Reveal/Center for Investigative Reporting

About

Seth Freed Wessler

Seth Freed Wessler is an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker whose accountability reporting on immigration, federal law enforcement and human rights has led to legislative and policy reform, spurred lawsuits, and inspired advocacy campaigns. Seth has won more than a dozen national awards for his reporting including a Peabody Award and the Hillman Prize. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and is the director of THE FACILITY, an Oscar-shortlisted documentary.

Seth was a staff reporter at ProPublica, NBC News and Type Investigations, and has contributed to The New York Times, This American Life, Reveal, Mother Jones, the Smithsonian Magazine, The Nation, WNYC, and others. He has been a visiting scholar at NYU’s Arthur Carter Journalism Institute, a Soros Media Fellow, and a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and has taught graduate courses at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Seth also won a American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award, a National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, an Investigative Prize from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, a National Association of Hispanic Journalists Award for Investigative Journalism, the Sidney Award, the Online Journalism Award, the Deadline Club Award for Investigative Audio Reporting, the John Bartlow Martin Award, the John Jay/Guggenheim Award for Criminal Justice Reporting and the Izzy Award. His Academy Award-shortlisted documentary premiered on MSNBC and was an official selection at film festivals including IDFA, DocNYC, DocsMX, Double Exposure, Full Frame and AFI Fest.

Seth's email is open for tips and ideas.