My First Day on the Hill Was an Insurrection

Four years ago I jogged toward the Capitol as a mob overran it. Now I'm MeidasTouch's man in Washington.

By Pablo Manríquez

Hey everyone,

My name is Pablo Manríquez, and I just joined MeidasTouch in its new DC office. On the anniversary of January 6th, I wanted to tell you a bit about myself—since my first day on the Hill was January 6th, 2021.

Let me tell you about me…

Before I ever held a press pass, I held a mop.

Before I ever asked Mitch McConnell questions that made him say something stupid on camera, I was famously tasked with getting rid of the rats in the kitchen of the Hawk ‘N’ Dove for eight bucks a pop. The work was ugly, relentless, and necessary. But it was work that had to be done.

I was born in Chile. My family fled Pinochet when I was a baby. My father worked the night shift as a janitor at a St. Louis hospital. I grew up hearing about the harassment he took from people who thought the guy with the mop was invisible. He wasn’t invisible to me.

I went to Notre Dame, worked the Obama campaign, and came to Washington expecting a job in politics. What I got was a dishrag and a tip jar. For nearly a year, I washed dishes and waited tables until 3 a.m. at Capitol Hill dive bars while journalists I recognized from cable news sat at the bar complaining about their jobs. I swore to myself: if I ever got to sit on their barstools, I would never complain about the work.

Then came the pandemic. I got laid off from a booking job in California and moved back to DC, into a house with twenty-three other people—mostly Latino immigrants—paying $500 a month for a bed. I made myself a promise: if I survived this thing, I would become a fucking reporter.

January 6th was my first day.

Let me tell you about Jan 6 what I saw

I jogged out of my apartment and straight to the Capitol. Network news hosts watched safely from their studios in horror, asking the important question: At what point does someone step in and run these folks off?

The answer, it turned out, was nobody. Not yet.

As I ran through Chinatown where motorists gripped their steering wheels with both hands, listening to radio reports of mayhem on Capitol Hill. Down Pennsylvania Avenue—the whole iconic, monumental stretch of it—as a lone jogger in the northbound lane while thousands of Trump supporters walked calmly the other direction, back toward the White House.

The cops were gone. All of them. Every officer in the District had responded to the coup attempt in the halls of Congress, and the entire length of Pennsylvania Avenue was unpatrolled. Storefronts everywhere were vulnerable. The plywood from Election Day had been taken down months ago.

When I got close enough to see the Capitol, my jaw dropped.

The entire inaugural grandstand on the west front of the building—where Joe Biden would take the oath in two weeks—was overrun by a mob of flag-waving traitors. They had turned steel barricades into ladders. They were scaling the white marble terraces of the legislative heart of American democracy.

While I watched from the street, inside that building, officers were being beaten with pipes and flagpoles. About 140 of them were criminally assaulted that day. But out here, a man on a megaphone announced to the crowd: “THEY SHOT A GIRL. SHE WAS 16 YEARS OLD.”

He was full of shit. Ashli Babbitt was a grown woman, an idiot, a traitor, and an Air Force veteran who bought into the seediest of Trump’s lies—the kind that fester in anonymous online backwaters where news-illiterate Americans get radicalized.

BOOM. A smoke bomb on the west front. Then another.

At this range, the insurrection air was thick with diseases: misinformation, white male aggression, and COVID-19. My mask stayed up, which put me in the minority, but also made me anonymous. I didn’t want to be identified as press. I wanted to go home alive.

I watched a MAGA mom with a lavender fanny pack wave a small American flag and shout at the mob: “He said go home! Read his tweets! Trump says we need to LEAVE!”

“WELL THEN, FUCK YOU TOO, MR. TRUMP!” a man shouted back. “All the tweetin’ and no action. You’re no better than they are, Mr. President.”

The president’s words had lit a blaze his tongue could not extinguish. It was time for me to go. Too many people on the grandstand. A stampede would kill us all. I took one last look at the Capitol dome, now obscured with smoke. What a fucking mess, I thought. Then I jogged home.

Photos by Pablo Manríquez

That night, after curfew, I walked my dog. Near 9th and O Street, I watched a Black man on a bikeshare get stopped by a cop and asked about the Military curfew. The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers vaping outside the Cambria Hotel saw the cruiser’s lights and shuffled quietly into the lobby, disappearing up the stairs to their rooms. The Black man was handcuffed and taken away.

The next morning, the MAGA mob had dispersed—hugging, fist-bumping, promising to find each other online. A Proud Boy asked if they could pet my dog Maybel. Before I could answer, my dog lurched forward for a head scratch. In an instant, she was surrounded by these scumbags. She smiled as they gently scratched her head and petted her coat, then thanked me for the opportunity.

I walked home with no way to know who would be in charge of our country the following day. The president? The military? The president-elect? I was born under a dictator. The thought occurred to me that I might be fleeing yet another one in the near future — a prospect that becomes realer by the day in this second Trump term.

Let me tell you what my goals are at Meidas

Five years later, we know exactly what happened on January 6, 2021. We know Trump sat and watched for 187 minutes while police were brutalized. We saw investigations lead to the arrest of over 1,600 people. We saw militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy.

And then we saw it all undone. On January 20, 2025, Trump returned and issued blanket pardons to nearly 1,600 of them. He let the violent ones walk. He let the seditionists walk.

That is why I am here. I’ve spent five years covering immigration news from Capitol Hill. I started Migrant Insider because I believed the immigration beat had become institutionally compromised—too many reporters trading access for softball questions.

This term, I have elevated the beat, holding press credentials for the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court. I’ve more broken news that matters to the people who never get quoted in the stories written about them than any other reporter in America: the cafeteria workers, the custodians, the families waiting for reform that never comes. The subaltern. I like that word because people have to look it up.

Now I’m joining MeidasTouch to do three things:

● Break news. Real scoops. The kind that makes powerful people uncomfortable. The kind you get by showing up early, staying late, and asking the questions the access journalists are too polite to ask.

● Elevate the migrant-centric news beat. Immigration policy isn’t an abstraction. Its families separated at the border. It’s workers feeding senators in the cafeteria while their own futures hang on legislative whims. It’s my story. It’s America’s story. And it deserves reporters who treat it that way.

● Go head-to-head with the biggest news networks in America. I used to watch those reporters from behind the bar. Now I sit in the briefing room. And I don’t intend to waste the seat.

Four years ago, I was living in a house with twenty-three other people and made a promise to myself. January 6th gave me my first clip. Now I’m here, in the MeidasTouch DC office, on the anniversary of that day, writing to you.

The Hill is infested with rats. The rats at the Hawk ‘N’ Dove were big and dumb. The ones on Capitol Hill are smaller and smarter. But I’ve done this work before.

Let’s get to it.