Sarah Betancourt is reporter who covers immigration for CommonWealth Magazine. Prior to joining Commonwealth, Sarah was a reporter for The Associated Press in Boston, and a correspondent with The Boston Globe and The Guardian. She has written about immigration, social justice, and health policy for outlets like NBC, The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and the New York Law Journal. Sarah has broken stories like the cancellation of medical deferred action by USCIS, a protected status that allows sick children and their parents to remain and work in the US legally. She has also covered the connections between Massachusetts businesses and DHS, how databases are used by police departments to procure information on immigrants, and uncovered the spread of an infectious diseases in family detention centers, beginning in the Obama administration.
Sarah received a 2018 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for her role as researcher for ProPublica in the ProPublica/NPR story, “They Got Hurt at Work and Then They Got Deported,” which explored how Florida employers and insurance companies were getting out of paying workers compensation benefits by using a state law to ensure injured undocumented workers were arrested or deported. Sarah attended Emerson College for a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Communication, and Columbia University for a fellowship and Master’s degree with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.