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.

To Serve the National Interest
Rhizome is pleased to announce To Serve the National Interest, an installation of new collaborative work by Ingrid Burrington, Josh Begley, and Seth Freed Wessler on view at Ace Hotel New York’s gallery from April 5 through April 28, 2017, as part of Ace’s support of Seven on Seven. Building on Wessler’s journalistic investigation into privately run immigrant-only federal prisons, Burrington and Begley present seventy-five individual lenticular prints of satellite imagery capturing these sites and government documents pertaining to them.
RHIZOME.org
Featured
Education Is Not Great Equalizer for Black Americans
Gaps in wealth, not in education, between black and white families may be the most powerful force locking Americans into their social class. In the story of the American Dream, education and a good job are supposed to erase the class differences into which we are born and open opportunity to anyone with merit and grit, regardless of race.
NBC News
Why Tea Party Lawmakers Are Trying to Conflate Poverty and Drug Addiction
Late last month, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law a bill that will require every person applying for cash assistance urinate in a cup. Their samples will be sent to labs where they will be tested for drugs. If a test comes back positive for illicit substances, the applicant will be excluded from the safety net program.
ColorLines
Featured
Deported Father Returns to Fight For His Children in Exceptional Case
Carrying only a small navy duffle bag, Felipe Bautista Montes walked off US Air flight 828 from Mexico City on Wednesday night, through an international arrivals gate at the Charlotte, N.C., airport. Two federal agents with ICE badges and guns on their belts followed close behind. Montes' face, framed by his tightly pulled back hair, remained stoic, glancing back at the agents as he walked--he didn't trust they'd actually let him go.
ColorLines
How the 'Best Interest' Bias of Family Court Threatens Immigrant Parents
Felipe Bautista Montes sat in the lobby in the Alleghany County social services office at nine in the morning last Friday and waited for his kids. A door opened and a man stuck his head into the waiting room. "I'm late, sorry. You'll have a full hour, Felipe." Carrying a couple of toy trucks he'd bought the day before at the dollar store and a pile of children's books, Felipe Bautista Montes followed the foster care caseworker down the hall, the sounds of children playing echoing back to where I sat.
ColorLines
Gleaning America's Farms
SEDGWICK, Maine- For years, Winnifred Gomm, known as “Ma,” drove to the local community radio station here in Hancock County to air a segment called Ma’s Kitchen. She’d offer tips on best kitchen practices and present “good recipes that people can make pretty easy with ingredients nearby.”. Now 84, Gomm has struggled to follow her own advice.
NBC News
Need a Doctor? This Anti-Poverty Program Will Get You a Lawyer, Too
When Tony Cox, 53, woke up in the hospital after suffering a heart attack when he fell off a ladder during a roofing job, he figured he'd hit bottom. "All I could think about was getting better and getting back to my family," he says. But that day in the hospital was not his lowest point. Over a year later, a sheriff's deputy arrived at the modest two-bedroom house Cox shares with his wife Donna and their now 16-year-old son bearing a notice that their home was in foreclosure.
NBC News
Your College Professor Could Be On Public Assistance
The professor at the head of your college classroom may be on food stamps. In search of cuts to their bottom line, American colleges and universities are using part time instructors to teach classes that a generation ago would have been the responsibility of tenured professors. Paid as little as a couple of thousand dollars for each semester-long course, hundreds of thousands of people with doctorates or multiple master's degrees are earning near-poverty wages working as adjunct professors.
NBC News
Alabama Auto Parts Plant Slapped with Federal Restraining Order
A federal judge in Alabama issued a temporary restraining order Thursday against auto parts manufacturer Lear Corp. after the Labor Department accused the company of illegally harassing its workers and obstructing a federal safety investigation. The Labor Department on Wednesday asked a federal district court to issue the restraining order against Lear that would force it to drop a lawsuit against a worker it fired after she made public statements about unsafe workplace conditions at the company.
NBC News
Class in America: Identities Blur as Economy Changes
For generations of Americans, that question was relatively easy to answer. If you owned a home, lived in it with your spouse and kids, and supported that family with a solid, well-paying job, you were a member of America's upwardly-mobile middle class. Book ending that vast middle were the upper-class elite and the proud, gritty working class.
NBC News
SB 1070: BEHIND THE LAW
The Supreme Court’s mixed decision on Arizona’s immigration law prompted both skepticism and debate. The Court ruled against most of the law’s provisions but left one standing–the one known as the “papers, please” provision, which allows state and local police to question individuals on their immigration status.
Latino USA
Man Without A Country
On the night in October 2006 that Shahed Hossain left his family’s house in Haltom City, near Fort Worth, for a long drive to Laredo, his mother, Habiba, cooked dinner—chicken and rice and okra picked from the garden. She piled her son’s plate high and watched him eat. Then she took his Bangladeshi passport from a drawer and handed it to him, leaving his green card safely stored away.
Texas Observer
'We're a Movement Now': Fast Food Workers Strike in 150 Cities
Fast food workers walked off the job nationwide on Thursday, as police arrested dozens who engaged in civil disobedience. Organizers said workers in an estimated 150 cities were expected to take part in the strike, which they said marked an intensification of their two-year campaign to raise hourly pay in the industry to $15 and to win workers’ right to form a union.
NBC News
How Fast Food Companies Steal Workers' Pay
Olivia Roffle has worked at Papa John's Pizza in St. Louis, Mo., for three years and she hates it. "It's just not an enjoyable place to work," she says. The 23 year old, who is enrolled in classes to become a social worker, doesn't make enough to pay rent at her own place so she alternates nights at her mother's, uncle's and sister's homes.
ColorLines
Featured
Border deaths: The last crossing of Tiger Martinez
On Oct. 3, 2012, Pima County’s deputy chief medical examiner and two assistants peeled open a white vinyl body bag. The corpse inside was recovered in Cochise County, part of the hot Arizona desert lands also known as the Corridor of Death. According to the autopsy report, the 24-year-old man with braided hair was of African descent, with his natural teeth in good condition.
Al Jazeera America
Call centers: Returning to Mexico but sounding 'American'
To a Mexican ear, Angel Perez speaks Spanish like a foreigner. To an American, his English is pure Texas. His mother took him from Mexico to the United States when he was two years old and they settled in Graford, Texas, population 600. He graduated from high school there, got a job cutting cedar trees, met a young woman from a town nearby and had two kids.
Al Jazeera America

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.