Niraj warikoo bio

  • Niraj Warikoo is a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, where he often writes about immigration and religion.
  • Niraj Warikoo is the religion reporter for the Detroit Free Press.
  • Experience: Detroit Free Press · Education: Columbia College, Columbia University · Location.

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    Niraj Warikoo

    Niraj Warikoo is a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, where he often writes about immigration and religion. He has won several first-place SPJ (Society of Professional Journalists) Detroit awards in recent years, including two in 2019 for his work covering immigration. He traveled to Mexico and southern Texas over the past year to write about the effects of deportation and immigration enforcement. Warikoo recently broke stories about the operations of a fake university in metro Detroit created by ICE that drew national attention and prompted a response from some members of Congress. He became the religion reporter at the Detroit Free Press in 2008, writing on the region's diverse faith communities, from evangelicals to Orthodox Christians to Jewish denominations. He has covered Arab-American and Muslim-American issues for 20 years, writing about the impact of the U.S. war on terrorism in Michigan, such as the use of undercover informants and the FBI's shooting death
  • niraj warikoo bio

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    New police chief in Dearborn to be first Muslim to lead department

    A veteran of the Dearborn Police department will be the city's next police chief, Mayor-elect Abdullah Hammoud announced Monday. 

    Starting Jan. 1, Cmdr. Issa Shahin, who has served with Dearborn Police since 1998, will be the first Muslim to lead the department. And he is believed to be the first Muslim police chief in the history of Michigan, said local community advocates. 

    His appointment comes at a time when the city is seeing demographic changes and calls for more diversity in city departments. Hammoud was the first Arab-American and first Muslim to be elected mayor of Dearborn.

    Dearborn has one of the largest city police departments in Michigan, in part because of a city requirement approved by voters that it must have a certain minimum level of police officers. In addition to 110,000 residents, Dearborn, where the headquarters of Ford Motor Co. is located, has a daily influx of employees and shoppers tha

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    About Niraj Warikoo

    Follow @nwarikoo

    Niraj Warikoo is the religion reporter for the Detroit Free Press.  He graduated from Columbia College at Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in political science and from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism with a masters degree in journalism.  Over the past decade, he’s written extensively about how the war on terrorism  impacted metro Detroit’s diverse communities. Since 1998, he’s covered the biggest Arab-American population in the U.S. and the region’s sizable Muslim communities. In 2015, he was named bygd a BuzzFeed list as one of the Top “100 Must Follow Twitter Accounts On Muslim Affairs,” ranking alongside top experts, writers, and Muslim leaders from around the world.  In 2005, he was selected to be a fellow at the University of Southern California, where he studied national security and civil liberties in the brev 9-11 era.   In 2008, he was invited to give a presentation on the r