Senior immigration reporter Laura Rodríguez Presa was at a family party on the night of Sunday, Sept. 28, when she started receiving messages about a family detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Millennium Park. A video of the family, including a child holding a doll and crying, quickly circulated social media.

“I felt really empowered to find the family,” Rodríguez Presa said. She posted a picture online, and a teacher recognized one of the children in the image as her student. After asking, the teacher sent Rodríguez Presa the mother’s phone number.

Rodríguez Presa said getting in contact with the family, as well as two other families also held at the ICE facility inside O’Hare International Airport that day, was the result of “years of gaining the community’s trust.”

Rodríguez Presa is one of several DePaul alumni who reported for the Chicago Tribune during Operation Midway Blitz last fall, and the paper was recently honored with a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for its coverage of the operation.

According to the Pulitzer Prize Board, the Tribune was chosen for “its powerful coverage of the Trump administration’s militarized immigration sweep of the city that described in vivid, muscular prose how the siege-like incursion of ICE agents unified Chicagoans in resistance.” The influx of federal agents reached DePaul when a border patrol agent was briefly seen questioning a worker on the corner of Fullerton and Clifton Avenues in October.

The prizes given by the Pulitzer organization are named after the Hungarian-born newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who is often credited with contributing to the birth of American mass media in the late 19th century. This is the Chicago Tribune’s 29th Pulitzer Prize.

Tribune reporters interviewed for this story said newsgathering during this period involved striking a balance between protecting vulnerable sources and reporting what was happening on the ground in a timely — but accurate — manner.

In January 2025, reports of federal agents at Hamline Elementary in Back of the Yards drew attention online, with some outlets reporting that those agents were from ICE, which turned out to be false.

Claire Malon, a Tribune content editor and data reporter who worked for 14 East Magazine at DePaul, recalled how long the paper waited for full verification in moments like these.

“There were so many stories that, either because of a reporter’s discretion or an editor’s, their journalistic judgment, were like, ‘We’re going to hold on this because we don’t have all the facts,’” Malon said. “And later it came to light that if we had run something, it would have been inaccurate or it would have been wrong.”

Malon said the Tribune was not necessarily always the first outlet to report a story but kept accuracy as its main goal. She said readers reached out to the Tribune thanking them for maintaining credibility in their stories and not fearmongering.

As a content editor, Malon observed that stories coming from the suburbs were some of the most frequently read during the operation, referencing a controversial nativity scene in Evanston that had a zip-tied baby Jesus.

Richard Requena, now a court reporter for The Times of Northwest Indiana, wrote about the nativity scene while he was covering Evanston and Skokie for the Pioneer Press, a division of the Tribune company. Requena lives in Albany Park, which was frequently targeted during the operation.

“This stuff didn’t go away when you stopped clocking in and clocking out, and I feel really empowered from what I learned at DePaul, to use my experience and my perspective,” Requena said, referencing the discrepancy between the federal government’s claims about who they were detaining and the reality on the ground.

Jeremy Gorner, the Tribune’s statehouse reporter, echoed this sentiment, and said he played a “supporting role” in the coverage by documenting Gov. JB Pritzker’s response to the federal government’s actions and rhetoric.

Gorner’s first paid journalism job was at the now-shuttered City News Bureau of Chicago, a news agency that began in 1890. He said their motto, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” guided the Tribune’s team throughout the operation.

“If people who are in positions of power tell you something, you got to check it out,” he said. “I think, really, it was as simple as that.”

Gorner said he is the same age as when his father, longtime Tribune journalist Peter Gorner, won his first Pulitzer with the paper. He called the win “a total team effort.” 

“I’m proud of the people I work with every day,” Gorner said.

Ultimately, Rodríguez Presa said she hopes the win inspires journalists to cover immigration in a way that acknowledges the law but also the humanity of those affected by government policies.

“I just really hope it makes other journalists, budding journalists, student journalists, newsroom leaders, understand the importance of covering this work in a different manner — in a more humanized manner,” Rodríguez Presa said.

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