Lomi Kriel is a reporter with the ProPublica-Texas Tribune investigative unit. Previously she was a reporter at the Houston Chronicle covering immigration, often focused on the Texas border. Six months before the Trump administration announced its family separation policy, Kriel uncovered how the government was secretly using the prosecution of illegal entry to detain parents until deportation and send children to federal shelters. Her stories resulted in the release of one mother and helped spur a pivotal American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit largely ending the practice. She received the 2019 George Polk Award for national reporting, in part for her continued work on family separations. Kriel, who was born and raised in South Africa, immigrated to the United States in 1998. She has also worked as a Central American correspondent for Thomson Reuters and a criminal justice reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University and speaks Afrikaans and Spanish.