In early September 2025, bystander videos of a flower vendor being arrested by federal immigration agents began pouring into Laura Rodríguez Presa’s phone through Chicago community groups and social media feeds. The Chicago Tribune’s immigration reporter started asking questions.
She wanted to know what happened to Leodegario Martínez Barradas, who is believed to be the first immigrant in Chicago detained and deported during the Trump administration.
Rodríguez Presa learned that Barradas had no family in Chicago — they all lived in Mexico.
“So it was his son who actually reached out to me and then his son connected me to a kind of like a family friend that was here, because for a while they couldn’t find him.”
Rodríguez Presa kept looking for Barradas. “I had to connect with the Mexican consulate to see if they could help me find where he was, (and I was) trying to also understand what was going on or what was happening. It really was a metaphor of what was going to happen next.”
As Rodríguez Presa tracked Barradas through community sources and the Mexican consulate, she began to realize something much larger was unfolding.
What followed was “Operation Midway Blitz,” the Trump administration’s first major concentrated immigration sweep, which soon took over the city and left immigrant communities living in fear.
The Chicago Tribune’s relentless coverage of the monthslong immigration crackdown ultimately won a Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting on May 4.
Well before government officials started speaking publicly about preparations for the operation, Rodríguez Presa had her ear to the community because she knew they were already organizing for what was coming.
“We had community members and community organizers that we were speaking to, that we were communicating with and how they were preparing and what they were feeling and what the plans were,” she said. “I was walking around Little Village, which is one of our largest Mexican immigrant communities, talking to street vendors, asking them how they’re feeling, what they’re going to do.”
Those direct community connections proved invaluable when the city was overrun with federal officers and news happened at a breakneck pace.
Reporting on an ongoing government operation that had no end in sight required consecutive long days and nights, said investigative reporter Gregory Royal Pratt. It also often meant reporters faced the unfathomable pain of community members.
A woman is given milk after federal officers threw canisters of chemical agents at members of the community and protesters from their vehicles while leaving the 3900 block of South Kedzie Avenue Saturday Oct. 4, 2025, in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
“It was relentless. There was news happening at all hours of the day. There were people calling me and calling other reporters in the newsroom with news about all these terrible things that were happening.”
He recalled receiving a video first thing in the morning of a daycare worker being arrested and detained at her place of work and in front of children. He watched it from his bed before his partner asked him to leave the room because the footage was so upsetting.
From September through the end of January, reporters worked around the clock and had to be “on” at all hours, Rodríguez Presa said.
“It was every single morning trying to figure out which neighborhood we had to be in and listening to what the community was — what they were seeing,” said Rodríguez Presa. “And so deciding what we were going to do next, right? Because a lot of the time, it was just really uncertain. The drones would be flying over Rogers Park, but then they’ll show up in Little Village and it was just being ready.”
And then, there was the fact that Pratt and Rodríguez Presa, among other journalists, were reporting on their own communities. Rodríguez Presa is a Mexican immigrant and Pratt is the son of a Mexican immigrant.
“It hit me personally because it’s my neighborhood and it’s my community and I was very concerned every single day about that,” Pratt said.
As their reporting continued, government officials increasingly targeted the two reporters on social media.
When Pratt reported the location of immigration enforcement on X while on the ground one day, Tricia McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for public affairs, called him out directly.
The official DHS account on X accused Rodríguez Presa of not reporting the truth.
Still, both reporters continued with their work.
“The ethics of journalism remain, right?” said Rodríguez Presa, noting that truth-telling and holding power to account were at the heart of her reporting.
After months of reporting daily stories, Pratt said he knew something more was needed, something that could articulate the magnitude and consequence of what was happening.
“I came up to one of our editors, Stacy St. Clair, and I said, ‘We really need to take a step back and write the definitive article about everything that’s happened,’” Pratt recalled. “I thought that was important because I didn’t want things to get lost or people to be numb to what was happening, which I think can happen when you have so much news happening every single day, you can get lost in that wave.”
Pratt said he and St. Clair knew that for such a piece, they’d need senior reporter Andrew Carter.
The story, “64 days in Chicago: The story of Operation Midway Blitz,” is a massive and consequential multimedia piece of over 9,500 words, with photos, videos and social media posts throughout.
Protesters tussle with federal agents as they block a federal vehicle from entering Broadview Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview on Sept. 19, 2025. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)
Pratt said Carter’s role in the story was indispensable. On top of his own original reporting, Carter was responsible for taking all of the reporting that Pratt, Rodríguez Presa and criminal justice reporter Caroline Kubzansky — which amounted to about 35,000 to 40,000 words — hundreds of hours of video footage and hundreds of photos, and whittling it down to a publishable word count that didn’t compromise the integrity or depth of the story.
“It was really hard,” Carter said. He and the team met and discussed structure and decided on a chronological framework. “Greg did a great job of making a timeline in a spreadsheet where he listed every story that we published by date, (including the) date of the incident that the story described. And so that was a huge help of having that to look at throughout the writing process.”
Carter knew he wanted to open the story with a moment that captured the city’s mindset at the time: what many believed was the end of the enforcement operation. Then-U.S. Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino and at least 150 officers gathered in Millennium Park for a photo in front of Cloud Gate, better known as “The Bean.”
Carter also knew the story’s ending couldn’t offer certainty. Six weeks after publication, Bovino and Border Patrol returned to Chicago. So he chose an ending that reflected the depth of uncertainty that the city still felt.
“It took most of December to write that and to edit it and move things around and get it in shape,” Carter said. “And it did maybe take some years off my life at the time. I did feel a pretty good amount of pressure just to get it right.”
The story was published on Dec. 28, a liminal space from a publishing perspective. With the holidays in full swing, news outlets often withhold major stories during that time in fear of missing readership. But the story resonated. It was shared in newsletters and on social media, and in the end, the publication date didn’t matter.
“It wound up being, I think, our most-read story of the year last year,” Carter said.
The Tribune staff knows the prize wouldn’t have been possible without the cultivation of community trust built over years.
“When I first started, it was really difficult to get people to speak to me, to us, because a publication like the Tribune had sort of a different reputation when it came to serving underserved communities,” Rodríguez Presa said. That’s changed over the years, in large part due to her near-decade efforts to build relationships.
Pratt said that the newsroom understood the importance of the moment, and “everybody was writing with clarity and authority,” but that also, the editors helped make such pointed and necessary reporting possible.
“We were fair, we were thorough, but we didn’t hold back out of some misguided attempt to be overly fair. The editors deserve real credit for that because, you hear stories about editors being scared to call a spade a spade, and our editors were not.”
