The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff Wins 2025 George Polk Award for Immigration Reporting

The Atlantic’s staff writer Nick Miroff is the recipient of the 2025 George Polk Award for immigration reporting 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.

At The Atlantic, Miroff has reported extensively on immigration and President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, including breaking the news last month that Greg Bovino was ousted from his position as Border Patrol “commander at large”; chronicling battles raging inside the Department of Homeland Security; reporting on ICE’s status following its withdrawal from Minneapolis; revealing that more than a third of ICE recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia failed the ICE personal-fitness test; and co-reporting a profile of Stephen Miller, detailing how Miller acts as an accelerant for the president’s most incendiary impulses and shapes the lives of individual Americans in nearly every realm.

The George Polk Awards were established in 1949 to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. The awards place a premium on investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and achieves results, and honor special achievement in print, online, or broadcast journalism. An announcement is below from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

Big news this morning: Nick Miroff has been named the winner of the 2025 George Polk Award for immigration reporting. This recognition is greatly deserved, because Nick has owned this beat like no other reporter. Working with his wonderful editor, Jenna Johnson, 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. Though he is winning this award in large part for breaking the news of the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia (and for his continuing coverage of that case), Nick’s stories on the internal workings of ICE and other government bureaucracies deserve equal praise.

Nick only joined us last year, but he has made himself completely integral to The Atlantic’s reporting. As you all know, he also broke the story that Greg Bovino was ousted from his position as the Border Patrol’s “commander at large”; he covered the battles raging inside DHS; he revealed that more than a third of ICE recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia failed the ICE personal-fitness test; and he co-reported our recent excellent profile of Stephen Miller.

The Polk Awards are among journalism’s most prestigious, and I’m so pleased to see Nick—and Jenna, and the whole team—receive this outstanding recognition.

Best wishes,
Jeff

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