Lillian
Perlmutter

Journalist covering
migration and
human rights
in Latin America
and the borderlands

contact me

My work has been published in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Policy Magazine, along with over 20 other outlets. My articles have been recognized by the One World Media Awards, the Inter-American Press Association Awards, and the Society for Features Journalism Awards, among others. I am currently NEWSWELL’s immigration reporter, based at the California border.

SELECTED MIGRATION REPORTING:

Dying on Camera: the migrants who died in view of Border Patrol surveillance towers
Times of San Diego in collaboration with MIT Technology Review
9.21.26

Soon after she crossed the border, Graciela Gómez Hernández sent the last messages of her life.

She began the journey on her own, but when she died, on a steep mountainside east of San Diego, she was not really alone. She was in one of the most heavily surveilled strips of land in the world, within view of a federal surveillance camera.

An MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego investigation reveals that hundreds of migrants died at the border in the past decade within the nominal ranges of surveillance cameras. Topographical analysis shows over half of these people died within a direct line of sight of a tower.

This reality leaves two distinct possibilities: either the surveillance network is ineffective at tracking migrants in distress, or it does spot them, and offers no response.

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PHOTO: MIT TECH REVIEW AND ANNIE BARKER

He depended on a prescription to keep diabetes in check. Records from ICE detention show how his health fell apart.
Times of San Diego/NEWSWELL
6.22.26

In his 23rd request for medical attention, dated June 2025, the man from Mexico wrote, “It’s been three days since I received my insulin… and I’ve been feeling really bad.”

The man was held at the Otay Mesa ICE detention center for 17 months while he endured type 2 diabetes.

I reviewed hundreds of medical records, complaint logs, and a doctor's disciplinary report from the detention center, revealing subpar medical care that detainees said put their lives at risk.

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Ada and her family fled El Salvador. She died alone in the New Mexico desert.
Rolling Stone
7.29.25

For a year and a half, Ada Montoya’s skeleton lay in the open air. She was just a few miles from a New Mexico suburb.

Her body was one of many.

The area where she died is a triangle of desert, just 25 square miles, a 20 minute drive from the Texas border, and the city of El Paso.

In the past three years, volunteer search parties and authorities have found over 500 human bodies here, on U.S. soil.

Using Montoya’s ID, left scattered in the desert, I retraced her steps, to figure out why she, and so many others, died here.

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ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW COOLEY

First place
Inter-American Press Association Awards
migration reporting award

Shortlist
One World Media Awards
refugee reporting award

Trick Clock: on the job with a seasonal migrant worker
The Baffler
12.5.24

PHOTO: THE BAFFLER

It was in the first warm week of summer that the toilet stopped flushing.

For two weeks in 2023, Jaime and the other eleven men sharing the one-bedroom cottage were forced to go next door to do their business, twenty-four men to one bathroom. The bosses took their time hiring a plumber.

Jaime is from a small town in Western Mexico, but this incident occurred thousands of miles away from home, in Flemington, New Jersey.

He is one of over three hundred thousand H-2A visa workers that travel to the United States each year. Their housing is guaranteed by their employers, as are basic rights: fair wages, medical care, and overtime

But interviews with over a dozen contracted workers who have lived in at least seven different states over the past five years reveal a rising culture of cutting corners, habits that can veer at times into bonafide labor abuse.

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Runner-up
American Society of Journalists and Authors
social change award

Fellowship
The Economic Hardship
Reporting Project

SELECTED MEXICO REPORTING:

Brigades of the Bereaved

The Dial
3.5.24

In Mexico, victims of enforced disappearances leave no trace.
Their family members risk their lives in search of remains.
Military and National Guard escorts are assigned to accompany search parties. But sometimes, they don’t show up.

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The Fainting Children

Insider
6.1.23

ILLUSTRATION: TARA ANAND

On September 23, 2022, 12-year-old Esmeralda walked out of the girls' bathroom at her middle school in Tapachula, Mexico, and fainted. Her best friend Diala came out behind her and also fainted.

Over the next hour, nine other girls and one boy at the Federal 1 public secondary school would spontaneously collapse in their classrooms, in the bathroom, and in the school's courtyard. Another 22 students would report other unusual symptoms like vomiting and headaches.

Over the next two months, episodes of mass fainting were reported in at least six middle schools in four Mexican states, hundreds of miles apart, affecting 227 children, most of them girls. Several students were sick for days or weeks.

Most parents believed their children had been drugged in a complex conspiracy, but all tests were negative. Instead, Mexican epidemiologists began to question whether the fainting epidemic was one of the first known cases of mass psychogenic illness spreading online.

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A Quinceañera, for the Elderly
Al Jazeera
12.11.23

It was the eve of Lupita Rivera’s 84th birthday, but she had chosen instead to go back in time and celebrate her 15th.

Hard of hearing and reliant on a wheelchair most of the time, Rivera was decked out in a ballgown as she attended her "Quinceañera de Oro", a party offering the opulence of a quinceañera to elderly, blue-collar women who never had the opportunity to participate.

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PHOTO: ANTON ALEXANDER

I have also covered natural disasters, dissident movements, violence against women, political prisoners, and more across Latin America and the Caribbean

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