See if you can ride along with some agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement rounding up Latino immigrants, the photo editor tells the photographer. Go capture a group of brown-skinned innocents being led away in cuffs. And if one of the ICE agents is also Latino, the editor adds, so much the better.

In the Trump era, such conversations are unfolding again and again in newsrooms across the United States. Our best “shooters” are sent out on a hunt for images of undocumented immigrants at perhaps the most vulnerable and degrading moment in their lives.

These images have been a staple of American journalism for as long as I’ve been in the business. Very often, they seem a kind of immigration porn.

When I was young and angry and saw such pictures for the first time, I confronted one of its purveyors. 

Read on, courtesy of The New York Times...