Investigative reporter Hannah Dreier was in The New York Times building on Monday when she heard the official announcement. She won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for her stories on migrant child labor across the United States, a reporting feat that encompassed interviews with close to 500 children over the course of two years.
In the official announcement, Marjorie Miller — the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes — described Dreier’s reporting as a “deeply reported series of stories revealing the stunning reach of migrant child labor across the United States — and the corporate and governmental failures that perpetuate it.”
For Dreier, receiving the country’s highest honor in journalism for her “Alone and Exploited” series was a validation of the work she and her colleagues did. “It’s pretty shocking and overwhelming,” Dreier told Poynter late Tuesday morning. “And I’m hoping that maybe people will look back at some of these stories and it’ll bring more attention to the plight of migrant child workers.”
Dreier hadn’t seen her colleagues in a month. She’s been out on maternity leave after welcoming her first child, who is seven weeks old. “Maternity leave is so strange. It’s like I’ve sort of been in this, I don’t know, cave, and it was really great to suddenly be back in the world with all these other people who are doing this work every day,” she said. “It felt even more dramatic because I’ve been so sequestered in baby land, and then suddenly I was back with a thousand journalists.”
Hannah Dreier, who won the prize for Investigative Reporting, with her baby, during the Pulitzer Prize announcement at the newsroom of The New York Times in New York, Monday, May 06, 2024. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)
Dreier’s investigation for The New York Times found that migrant children, who have been coming into the U.S. unaccompanied in record numbers, are ending up in brutally punishing jobs. It drew on many documents, including court and inspection records, as well as interviews with social workers, law enforcement officials and more. “This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century,” Dreier wrote in the Feb. 25, 2023 article. “Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.”
In her stories, Dreier introduced readers to a 15-year-old girl named Carolina who every 10 seconds must stuff a sealed plastic bag of Cheerios into a passing yellow carton at a factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Carolina is from Guatemala and came to the U.S. on her own to live with a relative. Readers also learn about Nery Cutzal, who was 13 when he met his sponsor over Facebook Messenger. Once he arrived in Florida, Nery learned he owed thousands to the man and began working until 3 a.m. most nights at a Mexican restaurant.
“It was the most intense reporting I’ve ever done in my life, partly just because there was so much uncertainty,” Dreier recalled. “We never knew what we were going to find. It was impossible to set anything up beforehand, so you were always on this tightrope on a plane, wondering if you were going to totally fail to figure out anything on the other side.”
Readers met these children and the toll this work and surrounding circumstances had on their young lives. Dreier described her process as very patient reporting, done mostly on the ground.
Cristian, 14, has been working in construction in North Miami for two years instead of going to school. Federal law bars minors from a long list of such jobs. (Kirsten Luce for The New York Times)
She also obtained data from the federal government to find concentrations of migrant children living in the U.S. without their parents and far from any relatives. “There were sort of these hot spots where there were kids living with strangers,” she said. “And what we found is that those were the kids who were the most likely to have to pay their own rent, to be on the hook for all their expenses, and to be working to support their families back home — or sometimes because they were living with an adult that was forcing them to work.”
This is the second Pulitzer Prize for Dreier; she won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing while at ProPublica for a series on Salvadoran immigrants on Long Island whose lives were deeply impacted by a botched crackdown on the MS-13 international criminal gang. Dreier was also a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting with Andrew Ba Tran on a series for The Washington Post.
Dreier began reporting on child labor exploitation shortly after joining The Times in 2022. In a March 2023 Times Insider post about her work, the award-winning journalist recalled studying the faces of workers leaving a factory in Grand Rapids. It was midnight and it was snowing. “I had come to the heart of the industrial Midwest because I thought I might find migrant children working dangerous jobs,” Dreier wrote. “As the late shift ended and people in hairnets began to emerge from the building, I saw that many of them were short and baby faced.”
Dreier’s stories as part of the “Alone and Exploited” series ushered in waves of impact which included congressional hearings, a White House crackdown, reforms in multiple states and more.
“It’s really affirmed my faith in the power of investigative reporting, but also sort of affirmed my faith and humanity,” she said of the results of her reporting. “These kids talked to me not because they thought there was gonna be any change, but because they wanted to warn other kids like them back home in Guatemala, or Honduras, about how hard life could be here. But they didn’t expect that anybody would really listen, that anybody would care.”
To see this cascade of changes in corporate America at the state and the federal level, she added, has shown her that people actually do care a lot more than she thought they would.
Prior to Monday’s Pulitzer announcement, Dreier’s stories on migrant child workers had already garnered numerous accolades, including the 2023 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, the 2023 Feddie Award from the National Press Foundation and the 2024 John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism from Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. She has previously worked at The Washington Post and The Associated Press in Venezuela.
The finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting were the staff of Bloomberg, for an investigation of how the US government aided the global spread of gun violence, and Casey Ross and Rob Herman of Stat, “for exposing how United Health Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, used an unregulated algorithm to override clinicians’ judgments and deny care, highlighting the dangers of AI use in medicine.”
