Pulitzer on the Road Podcast: Episode 5: Taking Children at the Border: Transcript

Recorded in El Paso, Texas.

Miriam: I couldn't say anything to my son because they took him away from me early morning when he was sleeping. It was early Friday morning when an immigration agent told me to get my kid ready because they were taking him away, and then I asked him, “Where are you taking him?” And he told me they would take him to a detention center, and I asked, "Why?" He replied by saying that now kids were being separated from their parents. I asked, "Is he going to be close? Is he coming back to me when I leave?" They said, “Yes, when you leave, wherever you go, your son will go with you.” He was sleeping when I put him in the truck. My son is about to be five years old.

Nicole Carroll: This is Miriam, a migrant from Guatemala. It's June 25, 2018, and she's speaking at a press conference at the Annunciation House, a charity in El Paso, Texas, working to reunite families separated at the border. This audio is from KTSM 9 in El Paso. Miriam's son was taken to New York. She was arrested while crossing into the country. But now as she's speaking, the government has withdrawn charges against her and she's desperate to get him back.

Miriam: I told him I wanted to talk to him, but he's mad at me. He didn't want to talk to me because he thinks I abandoned him.

Nicole Carroll: For a year and a half, the US government separated thousands of children from their parents at the US Mexico border as part of a new “zero-tolerance” policy. Previously, most families detained after crossing the border were processed and released for civil deportation hearings. But during this time, migrants were arrested and faced criminal charges. Children aren't allowed in jails, so they were sent to child shelters, often out of state. 

Reporter Caitlin Dickerson covered the chaos as it was unfolding, but she couldn't get straight answers to simple questions. What was happening? Who approved this new hardline approach? Why? She spent a year and a half untangling the origin of the policy that few seem to want and most agreed was cruel. Her story for The Atlantic won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. When controversies erupt, differing stories emerge. The public often isn't sure who or what to believe. The job of a journalist is to get to the truth. Caitlin's thirty-thousand-word story, one of the longest ever published by The Atlantic, laid out how this policy came to be and why it was doomed to fail from the start. She found it was proposed and shut down during Barack Obama's administration, and resurfaced under Donald Trump. It serves as a masterclass in investigative and explanatory reporting.

Caitlin Dickerson: I started almost every single one of my interviews for this story with the same spiel. I said, I covered family separations in real time. And I don't understand what happened. I would say to people, this seems to me a moment where everybody in not just the United States, but everybody in the world, was paying attention to family separations, but nobody really understands what was happening, why it was happening, who was responsible? Can you help me understand?

Nicole Carroll: Welcome to Pulitzer on the Road, bringing you closer to Pulitzer winning work through discussions between Pulitzer judges and winners. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll, a Pulitzer board member and Professor of Practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Each spring, the board meets in Pulitzer Hall at Columbia University in New York to choose the winners. The discussion is rich and insightful. This podcast is designed to bring a similarly thought-provoking experience to you. 

In this episode, Pulitzer Board member Ginger Thompson, Chief of Correspondents at ProPublica, who has covered the border extensively, travels with Caitlin back to El Paso where the family separation policy began. She's there to find out, how did this happen? At first, officials with the Trump administration said they weren't separating families. Then they announced that yes, separating families was a policy. Then they said separation wasn't the goal of the policy, just an unfortunate result of parents being prosecuted when they crossed the border. This was not true, Caitlin found: separating families was the intent from the start.

Ginger Thompson: Beginning in 2017, through the end of the policy, in 2018, the government separated more than five thousand children from their parents. Throughout much of that time officials lied to the public and to reporters about what they were doing. But I want to start with when it was and why it was you chose was to do this story. 

Caitlin Dickerson: As soon as family separations came onto my radar, and I had evidence that even just a handful of families had been separated from one another, I started to do what investigative reporters do. I started to file FOIA requests. I started to organize my notes, keep lists of important names of sources and figures who were involved because I think I knew, very early on, that I was going to be spending a long time on this story. 

Ginger Thompson: One of the things that I think people, or that officials said at the time, was that there were always children who had been separated from their parents, that this wasn't anything new.

Caitlin Dickerson: This is a really artful, and at a certain point, effective sleight of hand, intentionally confusing people to the point of being completely dishonest. To be very clear, historically, when parents and children were processed into the United States, one of two things happened prior to the Trump administration. One, they were detained together in a very small limited number of family detention beds, or they were released on their own recognizance into the country. The only time that parents and children were separated from one another as a matter of policy prior to that was if the parent had a grave criminal record that was thought to endanger the child, or if one of them was so ill that they were a danger to the other. I mean, really, child safety was the only justifiable reason for separating parents and children prior to Trump. So, you can say that family separations happened. But on far, far fewer occasions and for very different reasons. And, under Trump, what we're talking about is proactively separating parents and children, not for child safety. In fact, the opposite: to make them both suffer so much that they tell all of their friends and relatives back home not to come to the United States, because the same will happen to them.

Ginger Thompson: You and I were writing about children who had just show up at shelters or at, you know, child welfare agencies. And you described in your story how they'd be dropped off, like Amazon packages, and people didn't know who they were, how they'd gotten there. The kid couldn't tell who they were, how they'd gotten there, some of these kids could barely speak, they weren't potty trained. And there were hundreds of them out there.

Caitlin Dickerson: Parents and children were brought into processing centers by border enforcement officials, and taken from one another. Hundreds of parents and children were being violently taken from each other on a daily basis. And then at a certain point, in some places, border patrol agents start to realize that it would be easier to separate parents and children if they were lied to. And so, you hear stories of parents who were told that their child was being taken for a bath and never returned, or stories of parents who went to sleep next to their child and woke up and their child was gone. 

From there, parents were turned over to the US Marshal system, which runs a very complicated setup to rotate people in large facilities so that border detention centers don't get overwhelmed. Meanwhile, children were being placed in the care of the health and human services agency that has an automated system. When a law enforcement officer types in the age and gender of a child, this system finds a slot for them, you know, the child could be in Texas, and the slot could be in Michigan, or the slot could be in Oregon. And so, these children are then sent by contractors who delivered them like Amazon packages to these shelters, and handed them over to shelter workers who had no warning about how to care for them or what to do, and so those facilities became completely overwhelmed in their own right. And no one was keeping track of where mom or dad was, and where the child was.

When a family is processed together, they were given a family identification number and from there either put into family detention or released into the country. But what happened under zero-tolerance is that border patrol agents were literally going into these computer systems and using a drop-down menu that changed a family's designation from family to individual adult and individual child, thereby deleting this family identification number. From that point on, parents and children went their separate ways into the care of separate federal agencies who did not have systems for talking to one another. And there was basically no way to retrace the steps.

Ginger Thompson: And then, the other thing your story found was, not only that, but that there were deliberate efforts made not to reunify families quickly as another deterrent or effort at deterrent.

Caitlin Dickerson: At least initially, some of these prosecutions of parents went pretty quickly, and parents were brought right back to the border patrol station, where they had been detained initially and their child hadn't been taken over to an HHS shelter. And so, Border Patrol agents kind of not knowing what else to do just reunited them and then thereby making them a family again, reinstating that family identification number. And when officials in Washington, including Matt Albence, a really high ranking employee of ICE, when they got wind that these reunifications were happening very quickly, they tried to stop them. And Matt Albence really went all out, and you can see it in records of emails that he sent, kind of desperately trying to wake his bosses in the middle of the night and get them to put these reunifications to a stop because he said it was making the policy look like a sham. He said it was an embarrassment to the department because they had promised this very harsh consequence that was supposed to change the nature of the flows of global migration, frankly. And he didn't think it would be harsh enough if parents were only separated for a couple of days from their children. He thought it needed to last much longer.

Nicole Carroll: El Paso, a city of about 700,000, sits in the far western corner of Texas, bordered by New Mexico to the west and the north, and Mexico to the south. Since 2018, border patrol agents have reported an average of 1,500 to 2,000 migrants crossing daily. Ginger and Caitlin are talking in the offices of El Paso Matters, an independent local news site. Journalists here reported in real time about the separations. They heard accounts from lawyers and advocates and parents, yet official government sources kept telling them it wasn't happening.

Caitlin Dickerson: There were people in D.C., certainly, who did know this was happening and didn't say anything. But I think it's safe to say far more just didn't know. And that's part of the reason why, even though I had incontrovertible proof that separations were occurring, when I would contact the press office to get a response, they would say, no, no, we're not doing separations.

Ginger Thompson: Did it feel sometimes like an exercise in futility? Did you ever despair?

Caitlin Dickerson: Sure, I think I despaired more than I didn't despair. This was a really difficult story all the way through for the reasons that we just outlined, as well as this kind of campaign going on within the White House, especially to convince everyone working there, that the media couldn't be trusted. That led many members of this administration to not believe that family separations were happening when they were and when we were writing about them in great detail. 

Parts of the country read those early stories I did with that level of skepticism, you know, well, if this parent has had their child taken from them, they must have done something to deserve it. Frankly, the thing that I think helped this story to break through coincidentally is something that you published, Ginger, when you obtained audio from inside of a detention center of children who have been taken from their parents and who are crying inconsolably.

Nicole Carroll: [cries of many children, many calling out, Mama, Papi] "We have an orchestra here right?" A border patrol officer says unsympathetically, "What we're missing is a conductor."

Caitlin Dickerson: I believe that parents, regardless of political affiliation, regardless of their views on immigration, parents all over the world heard that audio of children crying, and they finally understood that we weren't talking about human smugglers and people who were abusive toward their children getting their due. We were talking about kids, just like anybody else's kids. Their suffering was being used to try to achieve a policy goal, which was just beyond the pale for most people. 

Ginger Thompson: Thank you for mentioning that.

Nicole Carroll: In her piece, Caitlin explains this bureaucracy and the origins of zero-tolerance. By the mid 2010s, she wrote, deepening poverty in gang and domestic violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador were driving children and families to the border in larger numbers. President Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, called a meeting with his top border enforcement officials to discuss solutions. She says Tom Homan, an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, advocated for criminally prosecuting migrants who crossed the border with their children, even though many came to the US seeking asylum. Under this model, these would be criminal cases, not civil as was the norm. Because of that, Homan argued the parents would be taken into federal criminal custody, and the process would trigger an automatic family separation.

Caitlin Dickerson: He told me a story that helped to frame his thinking and helped him explain why he thinks family separations are a good idea to this day. It was his experience responding to a deadly incident in Victoria, Texas, in which dozens of migrants were found having been locked inside of the back of a tractor trailer. 

He was called to the scene immediately, and surveyed this this truck that was filled with people who tried desperately to claw their way out of this un-air-conditioned trailer, and many of them died of asphyxiation and of heat exposure. He talks about coming upon the bodies of a father and son, both of whom are dead, and the child is five years old, which is the same age as Homan's child was at that point. And he tells me, he got down on one knee, and said a prayer that day and really tried to contemplate what may have been in this father's head in his dying moments and what he believes his father may have been thinking, you know, why have I done this? How is it possible that I'm responsible for the death of my child? 

Homan tells me that from that moment on, that he resolved to do whatever he could to make sure no other family died in this way. And so, he decides actually taking children away from their parents at the United States border, is the only thing harsh enough to convince people out of making this choice to come to the United States. 

Now we know, and I document in the story, why that didn't make sense. Even then deterrent policies don't have statistical support behind them, certainly not brutality for the sake of it. But Homan has this emotional belief that it must be true. We know that's not true, and yet that's why he raises the idea under Obama, and then he brings it back up once Trump has taken office.

Nicole Carroll: Caitlin reveals that the idea surfaced multiple times in early 2017. John Kelly, then Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Kelly, opposed separating families both for moral and pragmatic reasons. The policy would require hundreds of millions of dollars to build new detention facilities and months to train staff. But, Caitlin wrote, the idea to separate families proceeded anyway, on numerous tracks at once, including some that were out of Kelly's sight. Kelly learned that Miller was contacting various DHS officials to push the idea, and he was furious.

Caitlin Dickerson: Everybody gave deference to Miller because he was viewed as untouchable. He had this close relationship to the President and he basically was able to get away with things that nobody else could. That allowed Miller to bulldoze his way through agencies that he wanted to get things done. And immigration, obviously, is his number one issue, and family separation, he saw as effective and necessary.

Nicole Carroll: In July 2017, John Kelly was named Trump's Chief of Staff. He thought he had shut down the family separation idea for good, but a local initiative had been started that would come to be seen as a pilot to justify separations nationwide. When asked for ideas to stop migration, Caitlin wrote that Jeff Self, a senior Border Patrol Leader in El Paso, brought up separating families, again.

Caitlin Dickerson: It was immediately controversial and so, conversation from there, it didn't go away, I learned, but it went behind closed doors. And when family separations began, they started as a regional program in El Paso, which is why we're in El Paso. That's because border chiefs across the country got word from their superiors as part of this general call to shut down the border, you know, tell us what you can do to eliminate migration in your sector or better yet, don't tell us, just do it. Acting on those orders, Jeff Self said, well, I know of an idea that we've been batting around for quite a while and that I think will be successful. And he put into place this regional separation program in 2017. He didn't communicate that proactively back to headquarters in Washington, DC.

Nicole Carroll: Officers on the El Paso border launched the zero-tolerance policy, one pushed from the top and implemented on the ground, but that had skipped the usual reviews in the middle. Parents would be charged as criminals, and kids would be taken away. This started in El Paso then spread to other areas of the border. The journalists noticed. Caitlin wrote that government officials, some confused, some covering up, denied it for a year. Others just stayed silent.

Caitlin Dickerson: Being viewed as a squish, somebody who was too soft to actually crack down on the border was the quickest way to lose your job. And so, I think a lot of people held their tongues. Maybe because they thought that speaking up wasn't going to have an impact, but also to protect their own career prospects. It was pushing harder for policies like family separations coming up with policies that one up to each other in their harshness, that was the quickest way to get promotion. 

Ginger Thompson: And this story showed a, kind of, go-along-to-get-along kind of culture in our bureaucracies that led this to happen.

Caitlin Dickerson: To a certain degree, anybody can understand these dynamics. Anybody who's worked in any workplace, anywhere...

Ginger Thompson: Sure. 

Caitlin Dickerson: …has been asked to do something that they don't really think is the best idea. Anybody speaking out, you know, they think their job is on the line. And in fact, in the Trump administration, their job was on the line, because bureaucrats were viewed so skeptically, were summarily fired, without hesitation on a regular basis. When policies are made within the US government, when it's functioning properly, they start at the very bottom, they're vetted by people with very, very specific and granular knowledge. And only after all those people sign off on a policy, should it reach the desk of a principal. This story and family separations, in general, are an illustration of what happens when you cut out all those layers of vetting, and you just ask a few principals at the top who don't know how the system works to make huge consequential decisions.

Ginger Thompson: They did have input from experts telling them how damaging this could be, right? Both to the system itself, and to the people who would be affected by the policy. And they ignored that?

Caitlin Dickerson: It depends who you're talking about. So, you have people like Kirstjen Nielsen, who became homeland security secretary under Trump with no experience in immigration. She was a cybersecurity expert who had never run an organization of more than a handful of people in the past and who all of a sudden has over 200,000 employees. Kirstjen Nielsen was very vulnerable from day one in that position, and knew that she was, and was very much manipulated by her top immigration advisors, the people who were supposed to explain to her based on this early vetting that took place at the lowest levels of the bureaucracy, all that would go wrong if family separations were put into place nationwide. And they did the opposite. They told her that everything would be fine. They told her not to worry about it. 

Ginger Thompson: I do think there is a narrative out there that asks the question, why would a parent of a five-year-old child put their child at risk when they make decisions to come across two or three countries, all of them dangerous, to make it to the United States?

Caitlin Dickerson: It's really essential to understand the circumstances that people are leaving behind in order to wrap your mind around it. Many parents will say to me, "we were going to die." And so, when you know that that's the reality that you're facing, anything that's not we are 100% certain to die is an improvement. When you have nothing else to lose, you start to understand this choice. And at the same time what the smugglers are saying to families is the United States is very happy to welcome families right now. They don't want any individual men, but they're very happy to welcome children and so all you have to do is bring a child with you and then they'll be glad to let you into the country, and that's what people genuinely believe when they make this choice to leave for the United States. 

Ginger Thompson: I can't help but think this wouldn't have happened if it weren't these particular children. Right? These were brown children from, you know, foreign countries that the President had sort of described some of them as ****hole countries.

Caitlin Dickerson: The children weren't considered, and when they were considered, they weren't thought of as equally deserving of love and care and protection as American born children, as white children.

Nicole Carroll: So, let's talk about the families, the children. The team heads to Casa Papa Francisco, an El Paso shelter operated by the Annunciation House, that charity we mentioned earlier, that was reuniting families. It's been helping migrants for 46 years. After border crossers are processed and released awaiting a court date, many are brought here for help getting to their next stop, generally to a relative or a friend who gets them settled. We speak to Director Ruben Garcia about how migrants are handled now.

Ruben Garcia: Today, the majority of the refugees that we receive are apprehended by border patrol. And then they're taken to what is called the Central Processing Center, where Border Patrol takes all their information, fingerprints, and runs them through the databases to make sure there's no criminality. Border Patrol doesn't detain anybody, they hold people for X number of days or hours. ICE is the one that detains people. And they have detention facilities, but 99% of the detention capacity that is has is for single adults, heavily male, but also female. So, families cross over, Border Patrol picks them up, they take them to the Central Processing Center, and then they're all placed in what is an effect, removal or deportation proceedings. They all have a court date some point in the future. In the meantime, we're going to release them because we have no place to hold them.

Ginger Thompson: We've come here from New York, and in places like New York, which is receiving large numbers of migrants as we speak from the border, what we hear up there is that there's a crisis going on down here and it's chaos. What are you seeing?

Ruben Garcia: You have a constant flow. There always has been. As long as the flow stays within a certain number, it tends to be a non-event. Every time the flow spikes, then all the media comes. And of course, every time it spikes, it reminds us all that we've been unable to really come up with policies and processes on how do we handle this. And more importantly, we haven't even figured out what we want. Right now, the unemployment rate of the United States is historically low. We just haven't been able to sit at the table and say, look, we need people. How do we let them in?

Ginger Thompson: What did you think about family separation? How did it make you feel when you learned that that was happening?

Ruben Garcia: The word that comes to mind is, is, rage. Parents went to the county jail, especially in the beginning, and did not speak to the children for months, had no idea what happened. Where is my child? Or where are my children? Who's got my children? Who's taking care? Have they been deported? Where, likewise with the children: why did mommy do this to me? Why did dad do this to me? The media was the only vehicle that had the ability to bring about a change.

Nicole Carroll: Many advocates working with the migrants in 2017 said they were surprised by the change in policy. There was no announcement. Parents just started saying my kids have been taken, help me. Sergio Garcia, a Federal Public Defender who represented separated families started his career on the other side, as a federal prosecutor.

Sergio Garcia: It was back in 2017, and I remember, you know, being told that I was going to be assigned five misdemeanor cases. After visiting my clients at the jail, I learned that there were children involved. I learned that they were separated. I was defending these people in November. And I was thinking like, my gosh, Christmas is next month and here's the female prosecutor trying to take away these kids from their mothers. What's going on?

Ginger Thompson: And did anyone explain to you?

Sergio Garcia: We didn't know there was a policy in place. We had no idea what's going on. They were hiding the ball, so to speak. Obviously, later on, we found out there was a pilot program and it was, you know, zero-tolerance. But in the beginning, nobody wanted to tell. The judges didn't really want to ask difficult questions. I mean, how difficult is it to ask the prosecutor, why are you taking away this woman's child? What did she do? Illegal entry, a misdemeanor, the equivalent of a parking ticket?

Ginger Thompson: The government said a lot of the time when they got asked about this pilot program, that children had been separated from parents like this all the time, that what was going on wasn't new. Is that how you see it? 

Sergio Garcia: No, for me that was no, because of the type of a crime. This was a misdemeanor. Right? It wasn't even a felony. And to terminate custodial rights, I mean, I argued cruel and unusual punishment. You know, that was one of my issues. Eighth Amendment. You don't have to go to law school to know that this is cruel, and this is unusual. And let's don't forget that this type of punishment was been already put in place on people who had not been kept convicted. Where's presumption of innocence? We were in pretrial proceedings. We hadn't been convicted, and they were being punished already. That's clearly a violation of your rights.

Ginger Thompson: Going into this election year, Americans, according to most polls, are very upset, very interested in immigration. If you had to sort of point your finger to one thing that you think people are missing, what is it we don't understand that we should understand that might help make sense of why this is so hard.

Sergio Garcia: There are laws in place that work. The right to asylum, is a right. There is case law, just like a constitutional right to free speech, to freedom of association. Somebody asked me one time, are you for open borders? I'm not for that. But I am for the law that has been passed by Congress to be applied as it is without a red color or a blue color, brown color. Just apply the law. I think that's what they're missing. There are cases that merit asylum. This is not getting a driver's license. This is hard. It's an uphill battle. But if you prevail, if you have the evidence, then you should get the benefit that the law gives you, right? If there is a conflict, we can vote, we can change the laws, and we can make it the best we can. 

Nicole Carroll: During this time, in 2017, Linda Rivas ran a legal service clinic to aid migrants. Ginger and Caitlin met her on the Paso del Norte bridge, 972 feet that connect El Paso to its sister city, Ciudad Juarez, the most populated city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Linda Rivas: What really stands out to me is the story was repetitive. Almost every single woman that we were interviewing had been separated from their children at that point, you know, sometimes more than one child. By the time it was early 2018, age didn't seem to make a difference. By early 2018, you were hearing about babies and three-year-olds. I had a mom who had been separated from her child and also was pregnant and suffered a miscarriage in detention. And she couldn't articulate any words beyond sobbing. We were like around this very cold metal table that is at the detention center. And just tears falling down her face and just wetting the metal table. And I tried to tell so many of the moms, this is not what our country stands for.

Nicole Carroll: Families in Juarez can get temporary passes so their children can attend school in El Paso. Ginger and Linda were sitting in a concrete plaza at the foot of the bridge on the El Paso side. The sun was setting. School kids in white shirts, dark pants, and navy-blue pleated skirts passed by. They wore ear buds and backpacks and were laughing and joking at the end of a long day. 

Ginger Thompson: We're sitting at this bridge, and just dozens and dozens of students have been walking by who go to school in El Paso and live in Ciudad Juarez. And they do this every day. We don't even think about it in El Paso.

Linda Rivas: When I see these kids and they're in their uniforms, and they're done for the day, they're out of school and they're going back home to Ciudad Juarez, and I am reminded of the uniqueness of our border community and the beauty of our border community. We here in El Paso, you know, we are an immigrant community. And then we hear the national rhetoric that we're dealing with an invasion, and that toxic rhetoric has real life consequences, as when 23 people were killed in our local Walmart 

Caitlin Dickerson: By someone who was espousing anti-immigrant hate. 

Nicole Carroll: Ginger and Caitlin end the day where they began, discussing the time consuming, painstaking work of tracking down the truth, on complicated, often controversial, issues that impact lives. This is the purpose and the promise of investigative reporting. 

Ginger Thompson: You talked to 150 people, you got thousands of government documents, some of them that you obtained through lawsuits, you spent a year and a half on this work. You know what that says to me? What it reminds me is that this kind of journalism is not cheap, and not easy. But do you think about the future of this kind of journalism? Does it worry you?

Caitlin Dickerson: I'm very worried. I'm sure you are too. I think, you know, the economic challenges that our industry is facing, are very scary. There are whole swaths of our elected officials and people who are running and want to be elected officials who think it's really important to their goals to undermine the press constantly. And so, I spend a lot of my time as a reporter out in the country, educating people about what it means to be a reporter. What are the rules that I have to follow? You know, what are the ethical guidelines? What are the editorial guidelines? Sometimes people are really surprised to hear that I can't publish anything without fact checking it, or that I can't make something up, and that they have recourse if they feel I've published something that's incorrect. We want our stories to be right.

Nicole Carroll: In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union sued to block the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy. That halted the family separation process. In December 2023, a federal judge in San Diego approved a settlement in the suit and officially prohibited U.S. agents from separating migrant families at the border. It states that for the next eight years, crossing the border illegally will no longer be a reason to separate a family. However, President Trump has suggested that he'd reinstate zero-tolerance if he regains the presidency. The ACLU said in December that of the estimated 5,000 immigrant children who were taken from their parents, as many as 1,000 remain separated. The settlement provides additional help to all impacted. 

Caitlin Dickerson: That's a really big impact. That's not obviously just from my story, that's from this collective response to family separations, from journalists, from lawyers and from the separated families themselves. So many people kind of suffered in their own private corners when family separation was underway. And my objective is, what's the truth? What happened? Let's just lay out the facts.

Nicole Carroll: So, what makes a work worthy of a Pulitzer Prize? In describing this election of Dickerson's work, the jury praised “the groundbreaking reporting,” that “went beyond all other news organizations and provided definitive answers into how and why the nation's controversial child separation policy was set in motion.” Dickerson, the judges went on, “provides one of the rarest and most powerful examples of governmental accountability that journalism has seen,” the type that “exemplifies the highest qualities of the Pulitzer tradition.” 

Thank you for joining Pulitzer on the Road. We're honored to bring more attention to Pulitzer winning work and the creators behind it. This series is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University in collaboration with the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. It is supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation. All episodes are edited for length and clarity. 

Next episode we'll hear from author Barbara Kingsolver. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcast and tell your friends to listen in. 

To see this work and the work of all the 2023 winners please go to www.pulitzer.org. 

Pulitzer on the Road is produced by Central Sound at Arizona PBS. Our producers are Anna Williams and Alex Kosiorek from Arizona PBS, and me. Audio engineering by Rayell Abad, Alex Kosiorek, and Joe Miller. Editing, promotion, and other support by Edward Kliment, Pamela Casey, and Sean Murphy. Factchecking by Jessica Quesada. Christian Ramirez provided translation and voiceover. Pulitzer Administrator Marjorie Miller is our executive producer. I've been your guide, Nicole Carroll.

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