The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced on Wednesday that ProPublica and its newsroom partners won two News & Documentary Emmy Awards.
“Sobreviviendo al CECOT,” a collaboration between ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News, won an Emmy in the outstanding investigative news coverage in Spanish category.
The short film, produced by ProPublica’s Gerardo del Valle with reporting by Perla Trevizo, Mica Rosenberg, Melissa Sanchez, Gabriel Sandoval, Ronna Rísquez and Adrián González, tells the story of three Venezuelan men — Juan José Ramos Ramos, Andry Blanco Bonilla and Wilmer Vega Sandia — who were branded by the U.S. government as Tren de Aragua gang members and deported by the Trump administration to CECOT, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. All three men said they had no connection to Tren de Aragua and were not gang members, and in U.S. government data ProPublica obtained, none was flagged as having a criminal conviction or pending charges. The film also has an English-language version, “Surviving CECOT,” and a broadcast version that aired on the PBS investigative documentary series “FRONTLINE” later in the year.
“Estatus: Venezolano,” a documentary directed by ProPublica’s Mauricio Rodríguez Pons in partnership with FRONTLINE FEATURES, an effort from “FRONTLINE,” won an Emmy in the outstanding news feature in Spanish category. It chronicles the daily life of a Venezuelan family in Florida trying to stay together — and stay in the U.S. legally — as it navigates rapidly shifting immigration policy decisions.
The documentary is set in and around Doral, Florida — home to the largest Venezuelan diaspora in the U.S. It follows Yineska, a Venezuelan mother who had been living in the United States for nearly two years, and her family as their hopes and fears rise and fall with the changes to their immigration status and their efforts to find ways to avoid deportation back to the country they fled. “How do you start from scratch with a situation like this?” Yineska says. “We are afraid of what might happen there when we arrive.”
To Rodríguez Pons, Yineska and her family represent the many Venezuelans who’ve come to the U.S. seeking safety and opportunity — and, in many ways, his own immigration story.
See a full list of winners.
