A woman waves a 1776 American flag in front of an Alligator Alcatraz sign in Ochopee, Fla. Photo courtesy of D.A. Varela, The Miami Herald
The National Press Foundation’s 2025 Feddie Award is awarded to a team from the Miami Herald for a series on “Alligator Alcatraz,” the immigration detention center constructed over a matter of days this summer in the Florida Everglades.
“Their reporting exemplifies the power of local journalism to expose the human impact of federal immigration policies,” NPF judges said. “We were impressed by the Miami Herald’s combination of investigative rigor, clear focus, and public service.
The judging panel said the journalists’ work stood out for obtaining and publishing a detainee list that allowed families to locate missing loved ones in a chaotic system where hundreds had simply vanished. The reporting revealed how the hastily constructed facility, meant for the “worst of the worst,” actually held many minor offenders and at least one U.S. citizen, laying bare a deeply flawed system.
“On what has been arguably the defining issue of the first year of the Trump administration — a crackdown conducted by masked men affecting largely anonymous people — this was a newsroom putting names, faces, and human stories to federal decisions playing out in their local community. This story captured the outrage and devastation of people unable to fight back,” the award judges said.
The Feddie Award-winning Miami Herald team is state government and politics reporter Ana Ceballos (now with the Los Angeles Times), investigative reporter Ana Claudia Chacin, investigative data reporter Shirsho Dasgupta, Esserman Investigative Fellow Claire Healy and investigative reporter and editor Ben Wieder.
The $5,000 Feddie Reporting Award was established by the National Press Foundation in 2010 to recognize outstanding reporting about the impact of federal laws and regulations on local communities.
Recent winners include Cox Media Group and KFF Health News for their year-long investigation, “Social Security’s Secret,” in 2024 and Hannah Dreier of The New York Times for her 2023 investigative reporting on the labor exploitation of migrant children in the U.S.
