A handful of subjects consumed the news cycle of the last year but none more than the whiplash effects of Trump’s federal cutbacks and the contention around the federal immigration crackdown.
Brett Murphy (‘16) of ProPublica and Nick Miroff (‘06) of The Atlantic were two of the fifteen journalists awarded George Polk Awards for in-depth reporting on these seminal issues, becoming the most recent of our graduates to join journalism greats like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, I.F. Stone, Isabel Wilkerson and the Watergate team of Woodward and Bernstein as Polk laureates.
“Berkeley Journalism graduates like Brett and Nick are world-class reporters who protect the public interest at a time when freedom of the press is under intense pressure,” Michael D. Bolden, dean of UC Berkeley Journalism, said. “We’re proud of their work and their place in our history of journalistic excellence.”
Brett Murphy
Murphy won the international reporting category for “The End of Aid,” a series that investigated the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its consequences around the world.
As ProPublica described, Murphy and his reporting partner developed deep sources and used previously unreported memos, correspondence and other documents to reveal the officials behind the decisions and the resulting harm, including deaths of people who depended on foreign aid.
The stories sparked an immediate outcry, ProPublica said. Experts, attorneys, nonprofits and lawmakers asked the Trump administration to change course, and ProPublica’s reporting was cited in legal filings and congressional inquiries challenging the dismantling of USAID.
This is Murphy’s third Polk Award. He won in 2024 for the ProPublica story that revealed “secret, lavish and highly questionable gifts” to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and in 2023 for his investigation into a police training program known as 911 call analysis.
Last summer, reporters Brett Murphy and Anna Barry-Jester journeyed to refugee camps in Kenya and South Sudan, some of the places most devastated by President Donald Trump’s dismantling of foreign aid. They spoke to hundreds of government and aid officials, as well as refugees, who witnessed and experienced how political appointees cut programs in arbitrary ways.
Nick Miroff
Miroff won a Polk Award for his coverage of the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Miroff broke the story in March 2025 that the Trump administration had erroneously deported Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran prison despite his protected immigration status, and reported on developments before and after Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States.
The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg said in an announcement: “This recognition is greatly deserved because Nick has owned this beat like no other reporter….Nick has not only delivered scoop after scoop, but he has contextualized, deepened, and — this one is particularly important — complicated our understanding of America’s current immigration crisis.”
An announcement from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
The Polk Awards differ from other industry honors because they recognize the reporters themselves, rather than the news organizations that employ them. This distinction makes the awards highly coveted by journalists.
The 2025 recipients were selected by a panel of journalists and educators from 492 entries submitted by news organizations and individuals or recommended by former winners. The George Polk Awards were established 75 years ago by Long Island University to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.
–Marlena Telvick
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Established in 2006, UC Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) is committed to reporting stories that expose injustice and abuse of power while training the next generation of journalists in the highest standards of our craft. The program’s work has been recognized with the highest honors in journalism and made it a model for nonprofit journalism based at a college or university that has been replicated around the world.
Learn more about Berkeley Journalism’s ‘radical’ Berkeley experiment to accelerate the production of investigative reporters in this 2025 interview with Professor David Barstow, the Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Journalism and the first journalist to win four Pulitzer Prizes.
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