George Polk Award-winning journalists discuss their coverage of the Trump Administration's immigration crackdown, from reporting on immigration policy, raids, and deportations to assessing the impacts on people and communities across the U.S. For anyone exploring careers in journalism, this conversation is a chance to learn from the people who are covering this contentious issue to keep Americans informed and hold government leaders and law enforcement to account.
Stephanie Keith, News and Editorial Photographer, New York Magazine
Stephanie Keith is a news and editorial photographer based in New York City. Clients include Getty Images, Reuters, The New York Times, and Bloomberg.
Working for Reuters and Getty, her work has been featured in many international publications and media outlets. The New York Times has published her photos on the cover of the newspaper six times from January 2015 to January 2022. Stephanie is a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work on the New York Times team that covered a deadly fire in the Bronx.
-
Prior to moving to the New York City area, she lived in California, Germany, and Egypt. She has been documenting the Brooklyn scene most of her photo career, doing stories about Coney Island, Drag Queen competitions, Muslim holidays, Caribbean street celebrations, and the Haitian American practice of Vodou.
Stephanie attended Stanford University and received a bachelor's degree in cultural anthropology. Later she graduated from both the photojournalism program at International Center of Photography and the master's program in photography at New York University. She lives in Brooklyn with her two kids and her two cats.
Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Immigration Correspondent, CBS News
Camilo Montoya-Galvez is the Immigration Correspondent at CBS News, where his reporting is featured across multiple programs and platforms, including national broadcast shows, CBS News 24/7, CBSNews.com and the organization's social media accounts.
Montoya-Galvez has received numerous awards for his groundbreaking and in-depth reporting on immigration, including a national Emmy Award, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and several New York Emmy Awards.
Over several years, he has built one of the leading and most trusted national sources of immigration news, filing breaking news pieces, as well as exclusive reports and in-depth feature stories on the impact of major policy changes.
-
Montoya-Galvez was the first reporter to obtain and publish the names of the Venezuelan deportees sent by the U.S. to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, with little to no due process. Using that list, he co-produced a "60 Minutes" report that found most of the deported men did not have apparent criminal records, despite the administration's claims that they were all dangerous criminals and gang members. Montoya-Galvez was also the first journalist to interview Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador and imprisoned at the CECOT prison.
In 2025 alone, Montoya Galvez broke dozens of other exclusive stories. He disclosed the internal Trump administration plan to revoke the legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela; landed the first national network sit-down interviews with the current heads of ICE and Border Patrol; and obtained government data showing that illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2025 plummeted to the lowest level since 1970 amid Trump's crackdown.
Montoya Galvez's North Star is to cover immigration with nuance and fairness, in a nonpartisan, comprehensive and compelling way that respects the dignity of those at the center of this story
Before joining CBS News, Montoya-Galvez spent over two years as an investigative unit producer and assignment desk editor at Telemundo's television station in New York City. His work at Telemundo earned three New York Emmy Awards. Earlier, he was the founding editor of After the Final Whistle, an online bilingual publication featuring stories that highlight soccer's role in contemporary society.
Montoya-Galvez was born in Cali, Colombia's third-largest city, and raised in New Jersey. He earned a bachelor's degree in Media and Journalism Studies and Spanish from Rutgers University.
Elliott Woods, Contributor, Texas Monthly
Elliott Woods is a writer, photographer, and multimedia journalist based in Livingston, Montana. Over the course of a decade, he has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, veterans' issues back home, the fight against the Keystone XL Pipeline in Nebraska, Daniel Ortega's plan to build a canal across Nicaragua, the paranoia of the National Rifle Association, and the trials and tribulations of an upstart wildlife preserve in the heart of the Central African Republic.
Woods believes that all conflict stories are human stories, and almost all of them are environmental stories, so his work often dwells at the intersections of politics, culture, social justice, and nature. Woods won a National Magazine Award for multimedia for his work in Afghanistan, and his Pulitzer-supported work from C.A.R. won an Overseas Press Club Award for environmental reporting. When he's not working, Woods is usually fishing in the hills around his home, keeping one eye on the water and one eye on the tree line.
Moderator: Richard Tofel, Former President, ProPublica
Dick Tofel is Principal at Gallatin Advisory LLC, an advisory group focused on the media business. He was the founding general manager of ProPublica from 2007-2012, and its president from 2013-2021. During the period of Tofel’s business leadership, ProPublica published stories that won seven Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, and three Emmy Awards, among other honors. Previously, Tofel was assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal and general counsel at Dow Jones & Company and the Rockefeller Foundation. From August 2021 through 2023, Tofel was a distinguished visiting fellow in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he led a faculty seminar on “The Pandemic, the Press, and Public Health.” He is now an Instructor at the school and teaches a course on “Engaging with the Press.” He is also author of the Second Rough Draft substack newsletter.
Presented with Long Island University
Accessibility: Center for Communication provides reasonable accommodations to students with disabilities. Requests for accommodations for Center for Communication events should be submitted at least two weeks before the date of the accommodation need. Please email community@centerforcommunication.org for assistance.
Have we helped you on your career journey?
In an effort to measure the impact of our work, we are reaching out to those of you who have engaged with the Center in some way and ask that you please take a moment to respond to our survey.
Upon completing the survey, you will be eligible to win one of several Amazon gift cards worth $50.