Nina Bernstein

“Deaths in Immigrant Detention”

The New York Times

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Secrecy and evasion are routine in the coast-to-coast network of county jails, private prisons and tent cities created to hold thousands of people swept up in an aggressive campaign against illegal immigration. In this twilight world, detainees headed for deportation have been shuttled from jail to jail faster than relatives or lawyers can follow them. Foreigners with fewer legal rights than criminal inmates have languished and even died with no questions asked. Nina Bernstein's sweeping report provided the first important spotlight on the deaths of undocumented workers in detention.

Nina Bernstein has written on a broad range of social and legal issues for The New York Times, as a metro reporter and a national correspondent. With three of her colleagues she shared a 1995 George Polk Award for distinguished metropolitan coverage for an investigation into the death of Elisa Izquierdo, a child who was in the care of the city’s child welfare agency when she was beaten to death. Previously, Ms. Bernstein was a reporter for New York Newsday for nine years. She is the author of “The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award; it also won a PEN literary award and received the 2002 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Her first book of fiction, “Magic by the Book,” a fantasy novel for children 10 and up, was published in 2005 and has since appeared in Spanish, German and Turkish translations. She has a B.A. in European history and literature from Harvard, where she returned in 1983-84 as a Nieman fellow.