"After CBS News hit the brakes on a 60 Minutes story about CECOT prison, the League of Latin American Citizens decided it was time to start their own newsroom. Within months, El Grito Media has become a definitive resource."
"On July 7 in Houston, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a fifty-two-year-old Mexican man. Audrey Colocho and Katherine Torres of El Grito Media—which this spring started publishing stories directly on Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok instead of on a dedicated site—tried to piece together what happened, beginning with a social media post. Soon, they had collected more footage, from more angles—providing a definitive account that became a source for major news outlets.
El Grito, Spanish for “the yell,” based in Washington, DC, is an initiative of the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which provides the newsroom with funding but no editorial oversight. The staff, led by editor Arleen Aguasvivas, comprises two full-time members, one fellow, and seven interns: Colocho is a rising senior at the University of California, Berkeley, and Torres, who just graduated from Wellesley, lives in Boston. Their short videos, which cover a range of subjects affecting the Latino community, from immigration and law enforcement to mental health and childcare, attract tens of thousands of views.
Juan Proaño, LULAC’s chief executive, told me that he began entertaining the idea of working on a media-related project last year when CBS halted a 60 Minutes story about a group of Venezuelan detainees deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. LULAC had filed a claim with the federal government seeking compensation for the “wrongful arrest, detention, and removal” of the prisoners—many of whom have said they endured physical and mental abuse while in custody. “After literally months of working on that, they called us up,” Proaño told me, of CBS, “and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to kill the story.’ The team were very apologetic, and I could tell that they themselves were disheartened by it.”"
Carolina Abbott Galvão reports for Columbia Journalism Review August 4, 2026.
