Epoch Times journalist John Fredricks won two first-place awards for images captured during two dangerous assignments last year.
On June 18, California’s Orange County Press Club awarded him “Best Feature Photo” for documenting anti-cartel police operations in Sonora, Mexico.
Fredricks also won “Best Photo Essay” for covering activists’ repeated clashes with police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Portland, Oregon.
“It was definitely a hot year for news,” Fredricks told a fellow Epoch Times reporter in a June 18 interview.
When presenters announced Fredricks’s win at the Anaheim Hills Country Club in California, they acknowledged that the journalist “went into harm’s way” to capture the images, Fredricks said.
“I was very appreciative of that,” he said.
The prize-winning feature photo depicts officers in and around an armored vehicle as a helicopter hovers overhead.
That photo was one of many featured in a special report that The Epoch Times published on May 3, 2025.
Besides shooting the photos, Fredricks wrote the lengthy story accompanying them, detailing what he observed during Sonora State Police operations near the U.S. border.
“We were visiting ranches that were taken over by cartels, but then the police liberated them from the cartels,” he said.
Fredricks said that during the Mexico assignment, he was acutely aware that he easily could have been killed. But he felt “very blessed to have that amount of Mexican police officers” there to help protect him, he said.
Mexico ranks as the world’s second-most-dangerous region for news crews; nine journalists were killed there in 2025.
Only the Gaza Strip had more fatalities, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Fredricks’s award-winning photo essay, “In Photos: Portland ICE Protests,” consists of 34 images shot across several days in October 2025.
They depict officers, many in riot gear, facing off against agitators as colored smoke and flames billow into the air.
One photo shows officers arresting a suspect. Others show protesters’ signage, including counterprotesters supporting ICE.
While shooting the Portland photos, Fredricks suffered injuries from rounds that police had aimed at unruly protesters near him.
“I was hit with pepper-ball rounds ... kind of like paintballs, but they actually have like a pepper-spray kind of effect,” he said. “I definitely got yelled at by Antifa a couple of times.”
During similar protests that turned violent in Minneapolis earlier this year, Fredricks said “some type of shrapnel” hit his leg, causing enough bleeding that he “had to buy a new pair of jeans.”
Confronting danger is “just part of the job nowadays in journalism,” especially in recent years, he said.
“I’m not being a Debbie Downer about it,” Fredricks said. “It’s just like you have to be really real before you jump into situations like this.”
Fredricks, 38, of Los Angeles, has been a journalist for a decade and has won several other journalism awards. He has worked for The Epoch Times for about seven years and was previously a freelancer.
Other Epoch Times journalists who claimed awards for their work recently include Jan Jekielek, Eva Fu, T.J. Muscaro, Dan Berger, Nanette Holt, Natasha Holt, Madalina Kilroy, and Richard Moore.
