Maria Sacchetti covers immigration for The Washington Post. She most recently covered the separation of thousands of children and their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, and traveled to El Salvador twice to document the even longer separations of families who have been deported. She previously worked for The Boston Globe, where she was part of the staff that won the Pulitzer for covering the Boston Marathon bombings. She won the 2015 French-American Foundation’s Immigration Journalism Award for an article about migrants who died or disappeared crossing the Mexican border.
Her work has led to the release of several immigrants and the halting of deportation proceedings against others. She also covered the deportation proceedings of President Barack Obama’s aunt and uncle, investigated the Secure Communities program and reported on a post-9/11 flight school in Massachusetts that was teaching illegal immigrants to fly small airplanes. She has written extensively about secrecy in the Department of Homeland Security and sued the department in 2012 over the issue. Overseas, she covered the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015, the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and traveled to Central and South America on assignment. Prior to the Globe, she investigated the education of Latino schoolchildren in California and lived for several years in Puerto Rico and Costa Rica, covering the Legislature, hurricanes and multiple hostage situations. She has a bachelor’s in journalism from the University of Massachusetts and a master’s degree in Latin American studies/ economics from the University of Texas. She is fluent in Spanish.