Sandra Hernandez is a veteran journalist and communications leader. Her reporting helped secure the release of a U.S. citizen detained in federal immigration custody. She exposed a covert federal program to unlawfully sedate and deport immigrants, and poignantly captured the agonizing last days of a detained transgender immigrant. As an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times, she wrote about immigration, Latin America and criminal justice. She has reported from Latin America on Colombia’s civil war, Venezuela’s political turmoil and U.S. deportations to Haiti. She served as an editor of Underground America, a collection of oral histories of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. She was born in Colombia, raised in Southern California. She is a graduate of UCLA and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.