Her "Venezuela Undone" series illustrated the country's social and economic collapse through accounts of ordinary citizens struggling to survive.

Following the narcosobrinos affair, which saw president Nicolás Maduro's nephews arrested in the United States for drug trafficking, Dreier was detained by SEBIN secret police agents inBarinas, Venezuela.

Finally, agents said that they wanted to force the United States to exchange Maduro's nephews for Dreier, accusing her of being a spy and sabotaging the Venezuelan economy.

[4] A piece in the Columbia Journalism Review highlighted Dreier's work translating the Venezuela crisis for foreign readers.

She’s also gained a huge following on social media, where readers catch a glimpse into everyday life there—the quirky, surprising and alarming—sometimes from the window of her apartment," it said.

[26][27] In 2017, she received the James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for bravery in covering the violent turmoil in Venezuela.

[28] She won the Livingston Award, which honors journalists under the age of 35, for stories revealing that the Trump administration was using information from confidential therapy sessions to deport asylum-seekers.

The Pulitzer Board cited her “powerful, intimate narratives that followed Salvadoran immigrants on New York’s Long Island.”[34] She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2022 for “a gripping, deeply reported series that illuminated how FEMA fails American disaster survivors.”[35] She won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2024 for “revealing the stunning reach of migrant child labor across the United States.”[36] Dreier's work has been collected in several anthologies, including The Best American Newspaper Narratives and The Best American Magazine Writing.