AILA Presents Ko Lyn Cheang and St. John Barned-Smith with the 2026 Media Leadership Award

WASHINGTON, DC - The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) recognizes Ko Lyn Cheang and St. John Barned-Smith of the San Francisco Chronicle with the 2026 Media Leadership Award, given to individuals whose efforts in the media most accurately depict immigration and immigrants.

Ko Lyn Cheang covers Asian American and Pacific Islander communities for the Chronicle, which she joined in January 2024. She previously covered housing and city government for the Indianapolis Star, and her work has been recognized by the IRE Awards, Goldsmith Prize, and the Connecticut and Indiana Societies for Professional Journalists. She is a graduate of Yale College and speaks Mandarin.

St. John Barned-Smith joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 2022 and covers City Hall. He previously worked at the Houston Chronicle, where he covered law enforcement. He started his career at the Philadelphia Daily News, served in the Peace Corps, in Paraguay, and worked at the Montgomery Gazette, in Maryland, before joining Hearst Newspapers in 2014. His coverage of floods, mass shootings and police misconduct and other topics has been honored with several state and national awards.

They are recognized in particular for their powerful joint in-depth investigative multimedia reporting project published earlier this year, excerpted below:

Inside ICE detention centers, medical misdiagnoses and delays prove deadly

By St. John Barned-Smith and Ko Lyn Cheang |

April 9, 2026 4:00 a.m.

“Ismael Ayala-Uribe was in agony.

The pain started soon after immigration agents seized the bespectacled 39-year-old man, who had lived in the United States since he was 5, at the Orange County car wash where he worked last August.

They took him to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, where he developed an abscess under the skin on his left buttock…

On Sept. 18, a nurse gave him over-the-counter painkillers and fiber supplements used to relieve digestion problems, then sent him back to his cell.

Three days later, sweating and trembling, Ayala-Uribe was finally taken to a hospital. While waiting for treatment, he suffered septic shock caused by the abscess, according to a coroner’s report, and his heart stopped…

Ayala-Uribe is one of at least 48 people who have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office on Jan. 20, 2025, and launched an aggressive immigration crackdown. Last year’s death toll of people in ICE custody — 33 — was the highest since the agency’s creation in 2003, federal records show.”