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CalMatters, Evident Media and Bellingcat’s joint documentary “Operation Return to Sender” is nominated in 2026 News and Documentary Emmy Awards.
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences honors the best in American news and documentary programming and honored Operation Return to Sender with a nomination in the Outstanding Editing: News category. Winners will be announced in May.
“This extensive CalMatters investigation is made extremely powerful by partnering with Evident and Bellingcat,” said Kristen Gow, CalMatters Editor-in-Chief. “Combining on-the-ground reporting and exhaustive research with bold visual storytelling and compelling video editing reached and resonated with a wide audience.”
“Being nominated alongside CalMatters and Bellingcat is a testament to the power of collaborative nonprofit journalism,” said Kevin Clancy, executive creative director and co-founder of Evident Media. “The Emmy nomination for Outstanding Editing reflects not only in-depth reporting, but a cohesive and engaging piece from start to finish – and underscores Evident’s mission to take viewers on a journey of discovery.”
Congratulations to all the nominees and special congratulations to our partners at Evident Media for receiving five nominations in total and our partners at Bellingcat, for receiving a total of six nominations for this year’s News & Documentary Emmy Awards.
Operation Return to Sender
The powerful documentary is CalMatters’ first venture into film, thanks to our partnership with Obviously and Bellingcat. Ours an investigation exposed the aggressive tactics and misinformation behind what would become a blueprint for mass deportation campaigns by immigration forces in American cities. It focused on the claims of Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who will continue to lead the actions in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and beyond.
The investigation debunked claims of Bovino’s first “proof of concept” raid in Kern County. He claimed the operation was “heavily targeted” against immigrants with criminal records. However, the Department of Homeland Security’s own data obtained for this report revealed that the Border Patrol had no prior knowledge of any criminal or immigration history for 77 of the 78 individuals detained during the three-day raid.
After publication and ACLU lawsuit, federal court issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops across a wide swath of California and featured in CalMatters reports.
last week CalMatters reports that same federal court ruled that Border Patrol agents continued to make illegal stops and arrests after she ordered them to leave.
In a tersely worded ruling, the judge wrote that agents had “again detained people without reasonable suspicion,” relying on broad assumptions about white-collar workers rather than concrete evidence of immigration violations.
Border Patrol Tracking
In July 2025, CalMatters, Evident and Bellingcat mapped and analyzed videos of immigration raids in Los Angeles in a new short documentary “Masked, armed, strong.“
Less than a year later, CalMatters, Evident and Bellingcat are collaborating again to launch another documentary, “Agents of Chaos.” The project followed Border Patrol agents as they traveled from city to city for more than a year, documenting their tactics on the ground and through mountains of footage, since their first proof-of-concept raid in Bakersfield in January 2025.
Our investigation showed that immigration agents used a pattern of force and questionable detention, aggressive tactics that courts have said likely violated the constitution, as they moved from Bakersfield to Los Angeles and then to Chicago and Minneapolis.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.