It's been nice, actually, to keep in touch with a lot of the people and families that I've written about. Like with the kids I was just writing about from Guatemala, who survived being kidnapped and fleeing violence, it was nice to just sit down in their living room and play bingo with them, go to dinner with the family. And sometimes not thinking about it in such a mechanistic "I am now coming to report and get what I need" way, but just spending time, helps you see a more natural version of who they are too.

So much of our cultural representation of what an investigative journalist looks like, in movies and pop culture, is about this really testosterone-filled dude screaming, "Give me what you got!" I didn't see myself as someone who would be good at or comfortable with that.

I learned a lot, investigative methodology - wise, from litigators - watching their process.

I tend to only be able to obsess about one thing at once, and become fully engaged in and only interested in that thing. But in the longer term, a lot of my stories also give birth to other stories.

I found it really astonishing that undocumented migrants were kidnapped so routinely, that it was such a commonplace part of the journey for people trying to reach the US, and that we hear almost nothing about it here.

I feel like I partly came to writing through being in college during the start of the Iraq war, and knowing that those issues mattered lot to me, and wanting to go see for myself.

The journalist's job isn't to be someone's friend, or their psychologist, or anything other than what we actually are. And at the end of the day, that can definitely seem like such a strange, extractive relationship.