
Sergio R. Bustos
Vice President for NewsHe joined WLRN as VP for News in January 2023 to lead the NPR affiliate's award-winning news team.
Bustos was a reporter for two decades at newspapers large and small, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, before becoming an editor at the Miami Herald in 2005, and since has served as editor of POLITICO Florida and deputy opinion editor for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Most recently, Bustos was Enterprise/Politics Editor for the USA Today Network-Florida’s 18 newsrooms.
Bustos also worked as regional manager with the local-journalism nonprofit Report for America will jumpstart efforts to secure resources for WLRN News’ ambitious plans. He was South regional manager for RFA, a non-profit that seeks to fill “news deserts” caused by the nationwide crisis in journalism.
Born in Santiago, Chile, and raised in Annandale, Va., Bustos began his journalism career at The Washington Post — delivering the newspaper as a teenager in suburban northern Virginia.
After graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University, Bustos went to work as a reporter for newspapers in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley — the News-Virginian in Waynesboro and Daily News-Leader in Staunton — before becoming a general assignment reporter at the Wilmington, Del., News-Journal.
He later joined The Philadelphia Inquirer as a reporter after his News-Journal editor recruited him to the big-city newspaper.
At The Inquirer, he won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 1992 for a series of stories that revealed how courts and police routinely violated rights of Spanish-speaking farmworkers in southeastern Pennsylvania.
He also was among the lead reporters who exposed a scandal involving thousands of fraudulent absentee ballots that prompted a federal judge to nullify the election of a Democratic state senator. The Inquirer was later named as a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for the stories.
He was one of 10 journalists nationwide to be awarded a John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation grant to study at the University of Southern California’s Center for International Journalists, where he traveled and wrote extensively about Mexico and Cuba in 1992-1993.
Bustos spent more than six years as a Washington correspondent for the former Gannett News Service. He covered the contentious national debate over immigration and border security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, for Gannett’s southwestern newspapers, including The Arizona Republic.
He joined the Miami Herald as a first-time editor in 2005. He ran the teams covering police and courts, as well as Broward County, and he served as state and politics editor. He also was Sunday editor. In 2012, he supervised an award-winning investigation into a local congressman’s involvement in a campaign finance scandal, and oversaw coverage of several governor races and presidential elections. He co-authored a book, Miami's Criminal Past Uncovered, chronicling the city’s most notorious crimes, with Herald reporter Luisa Yanez in 2007.
Bustos returned to reporting in 2015 when he joined The Associated Press as a national political correspondent to cover the 2016 presidential campaign, assigned to cover candidates Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
He was later named editor of POLITICO Florida, where he edited a series of stories that led to the resignation of one of Florida’s most powerful state senators amid sexual harassment allegations from six women who were on the lawmaker’s staff or had lobbied him. He oversaw coverage of the Florida Legislature.
Before joining WLRN, he was Enterprise/Politics Editor for the USA Today Network-Florida’s 18 newsrooms. He coordinated coverage of the 2022 governor and U.S. Senate elections and worked with other newsrooms to cover Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial migrant relocation program and the devastating impact of Hurricane Ian.
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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed on Tuesday that Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian woman, died in federal custody at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach.
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Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz says the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), along with congressional Republicans, must cease their “illegal assault” on the nation’s Social Security program.
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A group of Latino Miami-Dade Democrats is calling out “four traitorous Republican Cuban-American politicians” — with a billboard ad campaign — for failing to protect tens of thousands of immigrants in South Florida from being deported under the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies.
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Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz says her deputies will be getting trained to work with federal immigration authorities “to get very bad criminals off of our streets” as part of an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry out President Donald Trump’s aggressive plan to deport undocumented immigrants.
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The family of Tiru Chabba, the 45-year-old father of two killed in last week’s shooting at Florida State University, announced they will hold a private funeral on Friday, beginning at 10 a.m., in Greenville, S.C., according to family attorneys on Wednesday.
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Transportation Security Administration officers who work in South Florida's three major airports are rallying Saturday to call on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Congress to restore their collective bargaining rights.
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South Florida progressive activists will join a nationwide rally on Saturday to “protest the Trump administration’s illegal and dangerous deportation of Kilmer Abrego Garcia and executive overreach of Supreme Court orders.”
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Trump enforcing U.S. registry for undocumented immigrants. Critics say will lead to racial profilingA federal judge last week allowed the Trump administration to move forward with a requirement that everyone in the U.S. illegally must register with the federal government and carry documentation.
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In a major victory for Florida tomato growers, the U.S. Commerce Department has announced that it's withdrawing from a 2019 agreement that had suspended an antidumping investigation into fresh tomato imports from Mexico.
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A Miami-based non-profit group is calling out the Trump administration for laying off the entire staff of the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP — a $4.1 billion program that helps millions of low-income households pay electricity and gas bills, saying some South Florida families may not get help to cool their homes.
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"With profound sadness we announce the passing of City Commissioner Manolo Reyes," the city commissioner's family posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday morning.
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The proposed law would require the Department of Defense to expand the mission of the Joint Interagency Task Force South to include efforts to stop illicit arms trafficking.