Must Reads: A 16-year-old's agonizing choice, a president's struggling chief of staff, and an .....

Compelling, ambitious reads you can’t afford to miss.

For Kevin Sullivan, reporting in Mexico feels like a homecoming. He and his wife, Mary Jordan, spent five years there as foreign correspondents and shared a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for stories about the country's criminal justice system. Now the couple, who also reported from Tokyo and London during their 14 years abroad, live in Washington, where Sullivan is a senior correspondent covering national and international affairs. Sullivan returned to Mexico to write about families that have been deported with children who are U.S. citizens. "They have all these programs to welcome the deportees back, said Sullivan, which is how he found Lourdes "Lulu" Quintana-Salazar. The 16-year-old, who wants to become a doctor, grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., and now finds herself in Toluca, about an hour west of Mexico City, in a country completely unfamiliar to her. "There are thousands of kids like Lulu out there," Sullivan said. He spent three days chronicling Lulu's struggle to decide whether to stay with her parents in Mexico or return to the U.S. and live with her uncle. She knew her family couldn't afford to fly her back and forth. After the story published online, readers contacted Sullivan with offers to pay for Lulu's travel until she finishes high school. "People are really generous," he said. "It's really satisfying when we write stories that move people." But it didn't make Lulu's choice any easier, he said. Her future will be shaped by whether she stays or goes.  .  — Lynda Robinson, Local Enterprise Editor For an American teen whose parents were deported to Mexico, an agonizing choice Lourdes “Lulu” Quintana-Salazar was born and raised in Michigan. Now she has to decide whether to live with her deported parents in Mexico or attend a better school in Michigan, where she feels at home. There are thousands of kids like her in Mexico — U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents who have been deported. And the numbers are expected to spike under the Trump administration. Kevin Sullivan  •   Read more » How Parkland student journalists covered the shooting they survived and friends they lost At the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school newspaper, teen journalists learn to grapple with grief while producing a memorial issue unlike any other. Whitney Shefte and Alice Li  •   Read more » ‘When you lose that power’: How John Kelly faded as White House disciplinarian  The chief of staff grew so frustrated when President Trump fired the Veteran Affairs secretary that other Cabinet members tried to calm him, according to people with knowledge of the incident. Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker  •  Read more » Dog rescuers, flush with donations, buy animals from the breeders they scorn The untold story of a river of rescue donations flowing to commercial breeders Kim Kavin  •   Read more » Caught in Congo’s tides of war: Renewed violence forces 40,000 to flee across Lake Albert to Uganda Ethnic conflict is pushing Congo toward humanitarian catastrophe, with more than 13 million in need of emergency aid. Max Bearak  •   Read more »