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Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
Podcast: Ripped Apart; Families Separated At The Border
President Trump recently issued an executive order that is supposed to put an end to the highly unpopular policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the US–Mexico border. While this news is certainly welcome, it doesn't undo the the trauma that the children suffering those separations endured.
This investigative podcast, created by Reveal, goes into a detention facility where migrant children who had been separated were held. In Part I of the podcast, a reporter follows the story of one woman and her son. After being separated, the mother learns that her son was being heavily drugged in the detention facility, affecting his ability to think and speak. In fact, according to her son, all of the children were being forced to take pills every day. When she requested, as a parent, that the facility stop giving her child medication, she was told that she wasn't entitled to stop it—only the doctor could.
In Part II of the podcast, a pediatrician elaborates on the trauma that the separated children endured, and how that trauma might later affect their development.
Finally, the podcast concludes with a segment from a bridge in Matamoros, a Mexican town across the border from Brownsville Texas, where hundreds of asylum seekers wait, hoping to cross into the United States to make their claim—claims that are almost impossible to make under the current administration.
