2007 Fellows

Oscar Avila
Reporter
The Chicago Tribune

Oscar Avila has covered immigration and ethnic communities for the Chicago Tribune since 2000, focusing on the region's booming Mexican population. His coverage of the issue has taken him to the U.S.-Mexico border and to towns throughout the Midwest grappling with immigration. He previously was a reporter at The Kansas City Star, where he was Missouri state correspondent. Avila reported from Bolivia in 2004 as part of an International Reporting Project fellowship. He is vice president of the Chicago Association of Hispanic Journalists and a graduate of The George Washington University.

Mariano Castillo
Border Border Bureau Chief
San Antonio Express-News

Mariano Castillo is the Border Bureau Chief for the San Antonio Express-News, based out of Laredo, Texas. He covers both sides of the border, with an emphasis on Mexican drug cartels, border security and immigration. Previously, Castillo worked as a police reporter and as Rio Grande Valley Bureau Chief. He is a 2002 graduate of Texas A&M University.

Jennifer Delson
Reporter
Los Angeles Times

Jennifer Delson has written about immigration issues for more than a decade. She is currently a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she regularly travels to Mexico to document the experience of California's immigrants. She spends much of her time in Santa Ana, where more than 75 percent of the population speaks Spanish, and alternatively, with the Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist and his local supporters. She has written about AIDS in migrant Mexican communities, Green Card Marines in Iraq, international custody disputes and Mexican hometown clubs. She has garnered numerous awards for her work.

Previously, Delson worked at the San Jose Mercury News and the Fort Worth-Star Telegram. She has a bachelor's degree in Latin American Studies from Wesleyan University and a master's degree in the same discipline from New York University.

Telis Demos
Reporter
FORTUNE

Telis Demos joined FORTUNE as a general-assignment reporter in September 2005. He covers a range of subjects for FIRST, and is co-author of a weekly small-cap investing column at CNNMoney.com. Previously, he was a reporter-researcher at The New Republic in Washington, D.C. He has also worked at ABC News in New York and writes occasionally for Slate. He graduated from Columbia University with a BA in economics and political science in 2004.

Brian Donohue
Staff Writer
The Star-Ledger

Brian Donohue, staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, NJ, has been covering the immigration beat since 2001. He worked previously in the paper's state house bureau, covering the criminal justice system, including the controversy over racial profiling by New Jersey state troopers. A 1993 graduate of Boston University, his previous work includes a one-year stint as a freelancer in Latin America and four years as a reporter with The Jersey Journal in Jersey City, NJ . He lives near the Jersey shore with his wife, Diana, and nine-month old daughter, Aurora Blaize.

Jerry Kammer
Washington, D.C. Correspondent
Copley News Service

Jerry Kammer, a native of Baltimore and a graduate of Notre Dame, got his first journalism job in 1974 with the Navajo Times in Window Rock, Arizona. He had gone to the Navajo Reservation two years earlier to work as a volunteer teacher and coach at a parochial school. His reporting led to a book, "The Second Long Walk," about a controversial program mandated by Congress to resolve a land dispute between the Navajos and the neighboring Hopi Tribe by relocating thousands of Navajos from rangeland near the Grand Canyon.

After earning a master's degree in American studies at the University of New Mexico, Kammer became the Northern Mexico correspondent for The Arizona Republic. In 1988, he transferred to Phoenix, where he joined the paper's investigative team. There he covered the story of a Phoenix financier, Charles Keating, who became the symbol of the national savings and loan scandal.

In 2000, Kammer became the Republic's correspondent in Washington, D.C. Two years later, he joined the Copley News Service, specializing in immigration and U.S.-Mexico relations. In 2005 he was one of two lead reporters in Copley News Service's Pulitzer-winning investigation of Rep. Randy Duke Cunningham of California.

Kammer received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for his reporting in Mexico. His work on the Keating story was honored with the National Headliner Award for investigative reporting, the Gerald Loeb Award for Business and Financial Reporting, and the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for investigative reporting.

Sarah Muench
Reporter
Arizona Republic

Sarah Muench covers public safety at The Arizona Republic. She has great interest in covering immigration not only as it relates to public safety, but also as it affects the ever changing culture in Arizona, on all sides, Latino and Anglo. As one of two Spanish-speaking reporters in the bureau, she also writes about Latino issues.

Just like almost everyone else in the metro-Phoenix area, Muench is from somewhere else. She grew up in Missouri then moved to Arizona to attend Arizona State University. She spent a summer living in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico to study Spanish and traveled to Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, to report on a journalism project. She also travels frequently Hermosillo, Sonora.

Muench worked for two years as a reporter at La Voz, the Spanish-language newspaper in Phoenix owned by the Republic.

Rosa Ramirez
Reporter
Rocky Mountain News

Rosa Ramirez grew up listening to stories about her father and uncles migrating from a small rural town in Mexico to work in the garment district in Los Angeles. Now, as a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, Ramirez enjoys telling the stories of immigrants from Latin America and other parts of the world who are making Colorado their new home.

Ramirez, who was born in Mexico, was part of a team of reporters who produced "The Border Within," a five-part series showing how federal immigration officials have failed to deport criminal immigrants who went on to commit worse crimes in Colorado, while spending precious resources deporting people living in the country illegally without a criminal record.

Ramirez joined the Rocky in October 2005 as part of the Scripps Academy for Hispanic Journalism, a two-year reporting fellowship aimed at increasing the number of Latinos in newsrooms and at improving the coverage of the Latino community. Before joining the Rocky, she worked for the Birmingham Post Herald in Birmingham, Ala., writing about dynamics of a southern state in the midst of an immigration wave.

Ramirez, who is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, graduated from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Robert Schmitz
LA Bureau Chief
KQED/NPR

Rob Schmitz reports for KQED, the NPR affiliate in San Francisco, as the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for "The California Report," a statewide public radio service in California. Previously he reported for Southern California Public Radio, where he covered Orange County, as well as Minnesota Public Radio, where he covered rural issues. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, Marketplace, and PRI's "The World."

Schmitz is also a freelance video journalist. He's worked on documentaries in China for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and New York Times Television. Previously Schmitz was a freelance writer in China, where he lived for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer and nearly another year as a journalist.

His work has appeared on The Learning Channel, the CBC, and in publications including The New York Times, The Star-Ledger and The Christian Science Monitor. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree in Spanish from the University of Minnesota.

Dianne Solís
Senior Writer
Dallas Morning News

Dianne Solís is a senior writer at the Dallas Morning News, where she reports on such topics as international trade, labor and immigration. She now writes nearly full-time on immigration, a subject she's covered off and on for 25 years. Her most recent work has looked at the meatpacking industry, identity fraud and the illegal immigrants who endure dangerous working conditions to cut up cows. Other immigration projects placed a human face on the enormous $25 billion flow of money sent back to Mexico annually by Mexican workers living in the U.S., and on the difficulties for Mexicans to come to the U.S. legally to teach in schools desperate for bilingual teachers.

Formerly, as the energy writer for the Dallas Morning News, Solís reported from México, Cuba and the Vienna meetings of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. From 1984 until late 1997, she was a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. In her last assignment, she was based in Mexico City. In the Houston bureau of the Wall Street Journal, she covered energy and border issues.

Solís has also been a reporter for two California newspapers. In the broadcast field, she has worked in television as an assistant assignment editor, wrote a public television documentary, and served on the board of directors of Radio Bilingue Inc., an award-winning public radio station chain based in Fresno.

Solís was a 1990 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where she studied international relations, economics, film and literature. She has a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University, and a bachelor's degree in journalism from California State University, Fresno. She is bilingual and a native of Fresno, California. All of her grandparents emigrated from Mexico to the United States during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920.