It is with great regret and deepest apologies that we retract the article headlined “Trump’s Executive Orders and NEIU: Navigating Policy Realities in 2024,” originally published on our website on February 25, 2025 and in print on March 13, 2025.
The student and community journalists at the Independent strive each semester to deliver accurate and relevant reporting on events affecting our university and the surrounding community as we learn our craft. In this instance, we failed. We acknowledge the many egregious errors within the article and deeply apologize for the harm this has brought to the NEIU Community.
It was the NEIU Community that alerted us to these errors, and we are honored and humbled by the care shown in the feedback we received. The concern from you, the NEIU Community, has reminded us of the importance of adhering to our policies and processes. We plan to implement adequate changes that ensure such a mistake never happens again.
In response to this incident, NEIU’s Independent will implement corrective and preventive practices to ensure accurate and reliable information for our news publication. We are establishing a fact-checking protocol based on the Fact-Checking Guide, which will be integrated into our editorial process. We are strengthening our editorial review process with source and data verification by all staff.
As journalists, we understand our duty to accurately report the truth. And we realize that, in this time especially, that duty has become even more integral. We acknowledge that a lapse in our editing process allowed inaccuracies to be published. This unfortunate occurrence has taught us an important lesson and we hope that, over time, we will earn back the trust we have lost, through our continued effort to learn and develop as a journalistic body.
But ultimately, we do ask you to receive all of this– our mistake and subsequent retraction and apology–with the understanding that we are student and community journalists, learning our craft while stretched entirely too thin by the responsibilities of school, life, work and survival, and mistakes happen. We, like undoubtedly the majority of the NEIU Community, feel the pressures of our world with increasing severity, and we are doing our best in these uncertain times. But we promise we will keep striving to be better as we bring you the news and stories that cut through the uncertainty.
NEIU’s Independent remains committed to providing ethical journalism outlined in the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) Code of Ethics. We are taking steps to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
