The Potter College of Arts and Letters invited journalist Caitlin Dickerson to shed light on forced displacement and refugee resettlement for its Cultural Enhancement Series.

Dickerson reports on immigration and human rights for The Atlantic. She was recruited by The New York Times in 2016 and has since worked for NPR and CNN. Dickerson received numerous awards during her career, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Peabody award, an Edward R Murrow award and two National Association of Black Journalists Salutes to Excellence.

She won her Pulitzer award in 2023 for “We Need to Take Away Children,” an investigative report into the first Trump administration’s immigrant family separation policies. She wrote both her Pulitzer-winner and her story on the Darién Gap, “70 Miles in Hell,” for The Atlantic.

Dickerson presented Life on the Move: The Global Refugee Crisis, a lecture on her two-year coverage of South American migrants who crossed the Darién Gap, a treacherous no man’s land that connects Colombia to Panama.

Cultural Enhancement Committee Chair and history professor Tony Harkins introduced Dickerson and the series that invited her. The Cultural Enhancement Series, now in its 27th year, invites “influential artists and thinkers” to speak to campus and community members, Harkins said.

“I’m from a farming community in the Central Valley of California that’s very diverse and has always been a hub for immigration,” Dickerson said in an interview with the Herald.

Dickerson enrolled in international studies classes at California State University, Long Beach, then expressed her interest in reporting on the subject to the New York Times.

“At that time, it wasn’t a very popular subject,” Dickerson said. “Now it is. Everybody wants to cover immigration.”

Dickerson said after Donald Trump won his first election, immigration became a more frequent topic in the media, and she stuck with the beat.

“The UN estimates that 120 million people on the planet are displaced from their homes right now,” Dickerson said. “That’s about one in 67 people. Or if you think about the population of WKU, that’s about 200 of your peers, or one to two in every big lecture hall.”

Efforts to block migration by plane travel exponentially increased the rates of migrants traveling the Darién Gap from 2015 to 2023, Dickerson said. The gap is the only way to travel from South America to North America on foot.

“The Darién Gap is notorious because of how dangerous it is,” Dickerson said at the event. “There are deadly snakes, spiders, jungle cats, hills so steep that they literally cause heart attacks, cliffs that are easy to slip off of and fall to your death.”

There is no edible food, and water is unsafe due to contamination from human waste. The climate in the area is also deadly, as the many rivers and frequent flash floods can sweep away migrants.

The journey can last from three to 10 days.

Dickerson noticed the rising migration rates in 2015 and had no desire to report on it due to the safety concerns, she said.

Later, photographer Lynsey Adarrio, whom Dickerson had worked with at The New York Times, reached out after she received a grant from National Geographic to report on the gap and invited Dickerson along. Dickerson agreed immediately.

“If I was going to do it, I was going to really do it,” Dickerson said.

She said some reporters hike in for half a day, hike back out, then fly to the other side of the gap and repeat the process. Dickerson and Adarrio traveled the entire length of the gap.

“There’s no substitute for seeing a story unfold before your own eyes,” Dickerson said in an interview with the Herald. “You’re never going to have the richness that you need to write the story in the best possible way unless you actually go there and do it for yourself.”

“My colleagues and I set out in the pre-dawn darkness with about 600 people from all over the world: Haiti, Ethiopia, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela,” Dickerson said.

The crowd received instructions from the Clan del Golfo, a cartel that controls and oversees the Northern area of Colombia that borders Panama.

“When the Clan del Golfo discovered a growing demand for international migration, they saw an opportunity to transition from simply moving drugs and weapons through the jungle to moving people,” Dickerson said.

She and Adarrio bought the cheapest ticket option, $300, from the cartel, which controls the pricing, thoroughfare, vendors and shelters along the gap. The $300 route is also the hardest journey and the most common route chosen.

Dickerson led the audience through a thought exercise, asking them to put themselves in the shoes of migrants who have no alternative but to leave home, family, and belongings behind.

Dickerson introduced the families and individuals she hiked with along the pass while displaying Addario’s photographs of them on a projected slideshow.

“The story is actually pretty broad, so I get to know really closely some of the people who I hiked through the jungle with, but it was just as important to me to explain how they had ended up there,” Dickerson said.

After the presentation concluded, journalism professor Becca Andrews, who hosted Dickerson during her visit, moderated a Q&A.

Dickerson attended Andrews’ Introduction to News Writing Class on Thursday to have a “very casual round-table discussion,” she said.

The students read her work and asked questions about their own journalistic projects.

“Journalism is just one of those jobs where you learn 90% of what you need to know on the job,” Dickerson said. “It’s really helpful for students to talk to somebody who’s in the job right now and just ask stuff that’s hard to wrap your mind around.”

Andrews asked Dickerson two questions of her own before opening to audience questions. More attendees stayed behind to talk with Dickerson one-on-one.

“I hope students will get a sense of how to do really in-depth reporting, especially when the conditions make that really difficult,” Dickerson said. “Reporting in the Darien Gap tested me in so many ways. It was physically grueling, it was dangerous, it was risky, but it was incredibly important. I’m so glad that I did it.”