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..