"Death Trap: Juárez migrant detention center fire a year later"
Recipient of the STAR ONLINE PACKAGE OF THE YEAR award in The Charles E. Green Awards (2023)
Staff Reporters
El Paso matters
Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters
Judge’s Comments:
El Paso Matters produced with partners an exhaustive, months-long investigation into a 2023 fire that killed 40 and injured 17 more at a migrant center in Ciudad Juarez. The fire and the deaths provided tragic on-the-ground context for the continuing contentious over immigrants, immigration policy and the response by the U.S. and Mexico. With partners La Verdad in Cuidad Juarez and Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch journalism collaborative, El Paso Matters’ multi-faceted three-part series recreated the fire using interactive models of the detention center and reported blocked doorways, inoperative fire extinguishers and misplaced keys to security doors that would have allowed the migrants to escape to safety. El Paso Matters also contributed interviews with severely injured survivors – who remained in the U.S. on humanitarian visas – and who recovered in El Paso hospitals and in the homes of their U.S. families. In an extraordinarily competitive category, El Paso Matters and its partners produced an impressive digital package, with compelling text, videos, maps and graphics, that served to remind us all that the churn over immigration is first a story about people.
Bill Celis
Journalist, Educator, Author
Judge’s Bio:
Bill Celis is a journalist, educator and author. For 20 years he worked at leading Texas and U.S. dailies. He is a former national correspondent for the New York Times and a former reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He also worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as a general assignments reporter and for the El Paso Times State staff.
For 25 years he served as a professor of journalism, first at the University of Colorado at Boulder and at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where over 21 years he earned tenure and served as associate director, program director and associate dean responsible for undergraduate and graduate curriculum, assessment, recruitment, diversity in the classroom and the recruitment of diverse students, staff and faculty.
In 2010 he led the school-wide committee that produced the first diversity audit of any USC school, winning the 2012 Diversity and Equity Award from the Association of Educators of Mass Communication and Journalism.
Among other teaching awards he won the 2018 Barry Bingham Fellowship, awarded annually to journalism educators for their work in diversity.
He is the author of, "Battle Rock: A One-Room School in America's Vanishing West" (Public Affairs, 2003), and is working on another book about disenfranchised children.
He earned his undergraduate degree in 1978 in journalism at Howard Payne University (Brownwood, Texas) and a master's degree in 1982 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in San Antonio, his hometown.
To read the award-winning coverage from the team at El Paso Matters, click the links below: