On inauguration day 2025, President Trump issued a flurry of executive orders that outlined the scale and scope of his promised immigration crackdown. Those orders shifted the reality of nearly every person in the country who was not a citizen, and rippled into the lives of many who were. Venezuelans became a particular target, with accusations that scores were members of Tren de Aragua, a gang that the administration said had “infiltrated the United States” and was “conducting irregular warfare.”
The ProPublica team, along with our partners across the country and abroad, marshalled our resources to tell sweeping, rigorously reported stories in videos that cinematically captured both the scope and the human impact of the administration’s campaign. Each of the videos in this series captures a facet of this unprecedented effort.
“Surviving CECOT” is a character-driven investigation about one the administration’s earliest and most shocking deportation efforts. In February 2025, Trump sent more than 230 Venezuelan migrants to a brutal maximum-security prison in El Salvador, without allowing them an opportunity to contest their removals. The administration justified its actions by claiming that the migrants were violent criminals. We painstakingly investigated the criminal backgrounds of every one of the men, obtaining exclusive government data that disproved the administration’s claims. The video interweaves the stories of three men sent to CECOT with the testimony of their families, who were unsure if they would ever see them again.
“Status: Venezuelan” was conceived from the start as an effort to follow a family through what promised to be a turbulent year. President Trump began to talk about Venezuelan gangs on the campaign trail. At home in Doral, journalist Mauricio Rodríguez Pons saw how it created fissures between Venezuelans who had U.S. citizenship and newer arrivals. Rodríguez left his first meeting with Yineska’s family and thought “They represent so many Venezuelans who came here seeking safety and opportunity — and, in many ways, they represent me, too.” That depth of understanding resulted in a film of incredible intimacy and nuance, one particularly hard to achieve when families like Yineska’s have so much on the line.
The final video, “A Year in Trump’s Mass Deportation Campaign,” zooms out for a comprehensive look at immigration enforcement in 2025. It pulls from groundbreaking reporting across ProPublica’s newsroom, from ICE’s violent arrests and holding of U.S. citizens to the multi-billion-dollar effort to rapidly expand the ICE’s ranks as they swept through major cities. This fast-paced video captures the whirlwind of the Trump effort that came to a head in January, when two U.S. citizens were shot to death by federal agents in Minneapolis.
For the unique marriage of cinematic storytelling and exemplary in-depth accountability journalism on one of the nation’s most salient issues, this series is a worthy contender for an Online Journalism Award.
