[1] He has received a National Award for Education Reporting, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and the 2018 Immigration Journalism Prize from the French-American Foundation.

He was a finalist three times for a Livingston Award, and was a 2021 Emerson Fellow at New America.

[2][3] In 2018, he received the Media Leadership Award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

His 2024 book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis chronicled the involvement of migrants from the Northern Triangle of Central America in the ongoing Mexico–United States border crisis.

[4][5][6] Blitzer's work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Oxford American, and The Nation.