2025 was a chaotic year. Each week, the sheer volume of policy changes, world events, and local elections threatened to overwhelm even the most diligent journalists. In the face of this avalanche of news, Type Investigations’ reporters doubled down on their deeply-reported investigations, and shed light on underreported issues and structural problems, along with newly developing challenges shaping our world. We are committed to holding power to account, and are proud to work with independent reporters and local and national news outlets to produce ambitious, high-impact journalism.
Here are a few highlights from the past year:
Olivia Gentile
Jewel Lazaro is photographed this winter at her apartment in Sant Feliu de Godines, Spain. She is one of hundreds of American mothers who
have tried to flee allegedly abusive partners overseas for the safety of home, only to be sued by them under the Hague Abduction
Convention. Image: Robin Hammond for The 19th
Over the past four decades, hundreds of American women who were raising children overseas have fled their allegedly abusive husbands for the safety of home, only to be sued by them under the Hague Abduction Convention. In partnership with The 19th, Olivia Gentile analyzed two years’ worth of rulings in U.S. Hague cases and found that 79 percent of mothers sued under the treaty characterized the petitioning father as abusive, and 55 percent of petitioning fathers accused of abuse won their children’s return.
Isiah Holmes
Image: Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner
For over a year, Ida B. Wells fellow Isiah Holmes investigated the Milwaukee Area Investigative Team, or MAIT, which was created to conduct independent investigations into police killings and promote public trust. Holmes reviewed more than a dozen MAIT case files and discovered a disturbing pattern: the team seemed to grant officers special privileges and often treated families of victims with suspicion or hostility. The story was published in partnership with Wisconsin Examiner.
Holmes sat down with The Backstory to offer his advice for reporters who want to investigate the police.
Liset Cruz
Members of Free Migration Project demonstrate outside the Philadelphia City Hall in 2023. Image: Brian Erickson/Free Migration Project
Hospitals have been quietly pressuring undocumented patients to consent to transfers back to their home countries, a practice lawyers and activists call “medical deportation,” according to an investigation by Ida B. Wells fellow Liset Cruz in partnership with The Nation. As the Trump administration steps up its immigration enforcement measures, the number of people facing medical deportation is likely to grow.
In August, Cruz talked about what inspired her investigation on The Backstory.
Paola Ramos
To avoid the deadly Darién jungle, migrants crowd onto small boats to make the trip by sea. Image: MIGUEL FERNÁNDEZ FLORES
As more migrants self-deport and turn around before they get to the U.S. border, Paola Ramos investigated what happens when migrants stop looking to America as a land of safety and opportunity. Ramos, reporting in partnership with Rolling Stone, traveled to Costa Rica and Panama to witness the growing trend of reverse migration up-close. She spoke with migrants, including 37-year-old Edinson, the de-facto leader of a group of migrants from Venezuela, as they navigated the arduous journey home—and traced the dissolution of the American dream.
Thomas Birmingham
Image: Tim Robinson for The Nation
American Landmark, a real estate company owned by an Israeli conglomerate operating in illegal settlements in the West Bank, is buying cheap apartment complexes in the U.S. Southeast, fixing them up, and raising the rent — sometimes by hundreds of dollars a month, according to an investigation by Thomas Birmingham produced in partnership with The Nation. Many buildings in American Landmark’s portfolio have eviction filing rates far higher than the national average.