From the outset of filming her report on college students who were not U.S. citizens, documentary journalist and then-graduate student Catherine Orr steered clear of common tools for crafting news stories about nonresidents wanting to conceal their identity. She aimed, instead, to explore the nuanced, everyday lives of her documentary subjects, the human beings forming the backdrop to the hot-button immigration debate. She and the University of North Carolina professors who oversaw her project are among those trying to refine the standards for covering immigration issues, the simple and the complex. In this article, the author describes covering the undocumented as one of the more challenging journalism assignments amid the oft-fractious immigration debate.