Rachel de Leon is a reporter and producer for TV and documentaries for Reveal. De Leon has worked in video for more than 10 years as a videographer and producer. Throughout 2017, she was the coordinating producer for Glassbreaker Films – an initiative from The Center for Investigative Reporting to support female filmmakers – helping to produce five half-hour documentaries for national and festival distribution, and more than 20 online minidocumentaries. In 2016, she won two Emmys for her work on the web series "The Dead Unknown" and the PBS NewsHour segment "Deadly Oil Fields." In 2014, she completed her first short documentary, “Cab City,” for her master’s thesis in the documentary program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. De Leon is based in Reveal’s Emeryville, California, office.
Since 2008, major private shipbuilders have earned more than $100 billion in federal contracts despite having been cited for serious safety lapses that have endangered, injured and killed workers.
Our video series examines the ways tribes in North America have dealt with mounting pressures from governments and corporations that take over their land for mega-projects such as dams, freeways and oil pipelines.
Fort McKay First Nation, a reservation in northern Canada, is home to nearly 400 Cree, Dene and other indigenous people. In the 1950s and ‘60s, petroleum operations started to surround the community, extracting oil from the nearby tar sands.
In the middle of the night in fall 2013, California Department of Transportation workers dug into the earth to construct a new highway bypass in Willits. According to federal law, the local Pomo people had a right to send tribal monitors there, but they allegedly were barred from the nighttime construction.
One year later, one of the first people to set up camp at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation reflects on the protests and how the movement has changed the course of her life.
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton promised his welfare reform law would “end welfare as we know it.” And it did. But the number of families living in extreme poverty has more than doubled since the act passed.
