Proof of registration, via a QR code on your phone or on paper, will be required to enter Reid Hall. Entry will be refused to those who are not registered. Please note that access will not be permitted 15 minutes after the start of the event.
This event will be held in English.
Organized by the Columbia Global Paris Center and Forbidden Stories.
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This event will be livestreamed. Register here to access the Zoom.
How do 72 journalists from 24 news organizations in 15 countries join forces to investigate a secretive deportation system?
For The Deportation Project, Forbidden Stories and its partners spent six months uncovering the hidden machinery behind the Trump administration’s deportation of more than 25,000 people to third countries.
By coordinating their work across continents and helping each other overcome obstacles to information, this collaboration exposed secret agreements, financial arrangements and the human consequences of these policies. It then transformed these complex findings into compelling visual narratives such as scrollytelling, interactive maps and video to make them accessible to all.
The Deportation Project illustrates the challenges of cross-border journalism, as well as its ability to uncover stories that no single newsroom could pursue.
Hear lead reporters Sofía Álvarez Jurado and Léa Peruchon in conversation with Forbidden Stories founder Laurent Richard as they will take you behind the scenes of The Deportation Project and discuss the methods they used, the challenges they faced and what has happened since.
Speakers
Sofía Álvarez Jurado is an investigative journalist at Forbidden Stories. She co-coordinated The Deportation Project, focusing primarily on people taken from the US to Latin American countries. She specializes on migration-related stories, with a particular interest in Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. At Forbidden Stories, she co-coordinated Alianza Paraguay and took part in several collaborative investigations, including Propaganda Machine, The Gaza Project, and The Rafael Project. Before joining Forbidden Stories, she worked for the Spanish outlet Maldita.es. Her collaborative investigation Harvesting Heat (supported by the IJ4EU Freelancer Scheme), which followed heat-related deaths among agricultural migrant workers, won the ILO Global Media Competition on Labour Migration in 2023. Her long-form journalism has also been published in The Dial.
Léa Peruchon is a senior investigative journalist at Forbidden Stories, where she specializes in reporting on environmental crimes. She co-coordinated The Deportation Project, focusing primarily on people taken from the US to African countries. In 2025, she received the Assises du Journalisme Award in the “Investigation & Reporting” category for Propaganda Machine, which she coordinated at Forbidden Stories. She also coordinated and took part in several award-winning investigations, including The Gaza Project, Story Killers, Mining Secrets, and The Baku Connection. Before joining Forbidden Stories, she worked for regional newspapers and several news agencies, including Premières Lignes Télévision, where she contributed to the investigative TV series Cash Investigation. In 2021, she participated in the production of a France 3 documentary exploring post-traumatic stress disorder.
Laurent Richard is an investigative journalist, an Emmy-winning documentary producer, and the founder of Forbidden Stories. Laurent has been conducting international investigations and reporting for television for over 25 years. At the age of 25, he traveled to the Kashmir Valley to report on the conflict between India and Pakistan, as well as to Palestine at the start of the Second Intifada. In 2004, he produced a major investigation for French public television on the Iraq War. Laurent is also the author of numerous investigations into the lies of the tobacco industry, abuses in the financial sector, human rights violations in Central Asia, threats against Indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon, and the clandestine operations of Mossad and the CIA. In 2011, he co-founded Cash Investigation, the most well-known investigative show broadcast on French public television (France 2).
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This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.
Reid Hall, the Columbia Global Paris Center, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination are not responsible for the views and opinions expressed by their speakers and guests.
