Liz Jones
Year started with KUOW: 2006
Liz reports on immigration and emerging communities for KUOW. Her work covers issues within our region’s growing immigrant and refugee populations, as well as stories connected to minority groups with a longer history in the area.
She comes to KUOW after several years at an online news startup, which was later bought by Oxygen Media in New York. Her last position there was health editor for the network’s website.
Liz has also lived in Spain and Peru and speaks Spanish. She is a graduate of the University of Washington, with a degree in communications.
Liz’s work for KUOW has taken her to Mexico and India. Both those reporting trips produced award-winning documentaries. In 2009, Liz received a regional Murrow award for a documentary about indigenous Mexicans who migrate to the Seattle area. In 2014, she won a national Gracie award and RTNDA’s Kaleidoscope Award for a series that focused on immigration-related links between India and the Puget Sound region.
Her work has also been heard on national shows including NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Here & Now, PRI's The World, Latino USA, Marketplace, The Takeaway and BBC News Service.
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Immigration authorities have detained 506 pregnant women since December, when the Trump administration ended a policy to release most pregnant women while their immigration cases are pending. -
Outside the immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington, a group of volunteers waits for people being released. They offer the former detainees food, clothing, cash, and help getting home.
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In-house chaplains have helped detainees cope with daily frustration, even reducing violence in detention centers. But meeting the spiritual needs of people from all over the world is a challenge. -
Only about 2 percent of farm workers in the county are part of a union, and few have successfully negotiated contracts with farms. Workers at the Sakuma Brothers Farm are trying for both. -
The city boasts one of the largest Nepalese communities. In the aftermath of the disaster, they've organized prayer vigils, collected money for relief efforts and sent medical personnel to the region. -
Indians are the 3rd largest immigrant group in the U.S. Decades ago, when immigrants moved here from India, they used to ask each other: "Why would you ever go back?" But now, many are heading back.
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American citizen Kenneth Bae has spent nearly 10 months imprisoned in North Korea. That's longer than any other American held there in recent years. Bae was recently moved to a hospital for ailments related to diabetes, an enlarged heart and liver problems. Bae's family says the situation is more urgent than ever.
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One of the nation's largest herb producers once relied heavily on undocumented labor, but has learned some hard lessons since an immigration crackdown. He says transitioning to a legal workforce was well worth it, but that navigating a cumbersome foreign worker program has been challenging.
