Eileen Grench

Eileen Grench is a writer in Brooklyn, NY. A former Olympic fencer and Columbia Journalism School graduate, she reports on immigration enforcement and detention for Documented, New York City's nonprofit newsroom serving immigrant communities.

Eileen Grench came to journalism sideways: first as an Olympic sabre fencer representing Panamá at the 2016 Rio Games, then as a Columbia Journalism School graduate pivoting toward the courts and detention facilities where the state exercises its hardest power. At Documented, New York City's nonprofit newsroom for immigrant communities, she tracks ICE enforcement with the granularity of a beat reporter who actually shows up: at a Queens street corner where seven men were arrested in a single afternoon, inside a White Plains courthouse where a Bronx high schooler fought deportation, at 26 Federal Plaza as lawyers challenged the constitutional ground beneath every arrest. The question she keeps returning to is the same one running through all of it: what does enforcement actually cost the people it lands on?