Tom Latchem is the Lead Global Correspondent for The Daily Beast and the writer behind the Substack PunchUp, where he covers the Trump administration's immigration machine with the speed and bite of a Fleet Street veteran who spent decades chasing tabloid scoops and now trains that craft on deportation policy and government corruption.
He trained on the Daily Mirror, did a stint at the News of the World, helped expose the British broadcaster Dan Wootton as a serial catfisher, and now files scoops on DHS from a spare room in the south of England. He is funny, fast, and entirely unbothered by whoever is on the other end of the phone at a government press office.
He told me the immigration beat is where it finally came together. "Finally in my career I'm actually doing some good," he said, although it sounds to me like he’s been doing good for a long time.
His latest, published on PunchUp with Migrant Insider, is the reason I wanted to talk. The investigation is built on a document dump that landed in his lap anonymously, and it shows DHS quietly designing and funding a deportation processing system embedded inside Panama’s own immigration service, with a five-day appeal window that immigration lawyers he spoke to call almost impossible to use.
What Tom found is an off-the-shelf version DHS can plug in elsewhere, plus the small detail that the agency claimed “no nexus” to the system while the documents clearly granted it direct log-in access to the case files. This work was done in partnership with Pablo Manríquez at Migrant Insider and Tom’s protégé Will Neal also at the Daily Beast.
As a political geographer, I recognized the shape of it right away as a textbook case of border externalization, the well-documented practice by which wealthy states push migration enforcement outward onto transit countries to keep arrivals, and the legal obligations they trigger, off their own soil. This is a similar playbook the EU has run for years through countries like Morocco and Turkey, where a wealthier country pays a poorer one to enforce its border out of reach of its own courts.
Tom is the rare reporter who can describe a slide into authoritarianism and a DHS press flack in the same breath without losing the thread of either. He talked about the official statement DHS sent him for publication, which called him a “10 rats in a trench coat excuse for a journalist,” a line he found more mean than funny and which tells you most of what you need to know about the agency’s relationship with the facts.
His larger point is serious. When a press office will deny something printed in black and white in its own documents, he finds himself reporting inside a post-truth environment where the ordinary adult conversation between a journalist and a government no longer happens with any sense of decorum.
I really enjoyed our conversation. Tom brings a sense of enthusiasm and levity to a serious topic, and is already making waves in his investigative work. Listen to our conversation above and punch up with Tom on PunchUp and over at the Daily Beast.
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