Nicole Foy

Ancil Payne Fellow

Nicole Foy is ProPublica’s Ancil Payne Fellow, reporting on immigration and labor. Before joining ProPublica, she was an enterprise and investigative reporter across the West, focusing on immigrants, Latino communities, farmworkers and inequality. She previously worked for CalMatters, the Austin American-Statesman, the Idaho Statesman, the Idaho Press and the Orange County Register.

While in Idaho, she was a 2020 Community Impact Fellow for Stanford University’s John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship program, leading a bilingual COVID-19 reporting collaborative that published health and public safety news in Spanish — even adding interpretation to state COVID-19 press conferences — when Idaho public officials did not.

Her work has helped change laws and spur change: Following her coverage, an Idaho county overturned its rule mandating that poll workers speak only English to voters; Texas raised the minimum wage for caregivers; and California expedited aid to undocumented farmworkers devastated by historic flooding. She’s won local, state and national awards, including the Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability, the 2022 Sigma Chi Award for Investigative Reporting, a regional Media Innovation Edward R. Murrow Award, and awards from the California News Publishers Association, Texas Managing Editors and the Idaho Press Club.

She is a board member for The Uproot Project, a network that supports environmental reporters of color, and served on the 2023-24 awards committee for Investigative Reporters and Editors. Foy is also the board president and co-founder of Voces Internship of Idaho, a nonprofit that places Idaho Latino students in paid journalism internships.

Foy grew up in California’s Central Valley and is a graduate of Biola University. She is based in New York.

Immigrants’ Resentment Over New Arrivals Helped Boost Trump’s Popularity With Latino Voters

Across the U.S., Latino immigrants who’ve been in the country a long time felt that asylum-seekers got preferential treatment. “Those of us who have been here for years get nothing,” said one woman from Mexico who has lived in Wisconsin for decades.

Un inmigrante murió construyendo un barco para el gobierno de EE. UU. Su familia no recibió nada.

Elmer De León fue uno de muchos inmigrantes contratados por astilleros estadounidenses para cubrir la urgente necesidad de mano de obra calificada. Estos trabajadores hacen las mismas tareas y corren los mismos riesgos que sus contrapartes estadounidenses, pero no cuentan con apoyo cuando las cosas salen mal.

An Immigrant Died Building a Ship for the U.S. Government. His Family Got Nothing.

Elmer Pérez was one of many immigrants hired by U.S. shipbuilders to fill the urgent need for skilled labor. These workers do the same jobs and take the same risks as their American counterparts, but are left on their own when things go wrong.

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