Last year, after her husband of 23 years died of COVID-19, Carmen Marquez fled a violent village in Venezuela with her teenage daughter and made it to the sanctuary city of San Francisco.   

On Monday, she was released from the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, after surviving homelessness and bacterial meningitis, which led to the amputation of her leg and 9 fingers, with no permanent housing in which to recover and rebuild her life. If San Francisco had a more robust placement program for people seeking asylum, perhaps Marquez’s story would have played out differently according to a church-based advocacy group. 

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.