2022 Silver Showcase Investigative Award: "Operation Lone Star"

The winners of this year’s Silver Showcase Investigative Award went to The Texas Tribune for it’s series, “Operation Lone Star: Texas’s Multimillion Dollar Crackdown on the Border.” The Texas Tribune collaborated with ProPublica, The Marshall Project, and the Military Times.

After Governor Abbott proclaimed the operation a success, citing 11,000 criminal arrests and the apprehension of millions of lethal doses of drugs, the series revealed that a lot of the boasts from the governor and state law enfrocement were wrong or grossly exaggerated.

“This was something where the governor was making a very drastic change and implementing a lot of new policies right out of the gate, and right away we were hearing a lot of numbers coming from the governor’s office as to how this was going,” said Tribune criminal justice reporter Jolie McCullough. “So, the interest on my end was that the governor’s operation had erected this new criminal justice system, specifically for migrants.”

Migrants were arrested for trespassing, new court systems were set up, and state prisons were turned into jail cells. “It was a whole new world, essentially, of criminal procedure and it was something I felt we really needed to keep a close eye on,” McCullough said.

Tribune reporters Perla Trevizo and Jolie McCullough, two recipients of the award-winning team, spoke with the Headliners Foundation’s Mark Morrison to discuss their award-winning coverage.