Burlington Free Press reporter Dan D’Ambrosio won a first place award Saturday in the 2024 New England Better Newspaper Competition in Portland, Maine, for his April 2024 story about an undocumented farm worker in Vermont who was deported to Guatemala last year, despite threats of criminal violence against him.

D’Ambrosio won first place in the Social Issues Feature Story category for his story about Bernardino Suchite Canan. The competition is sponsored by the New England Newspaper & Press Association (NENPA).

Canan had been working on an Irasburg dairy farm for seven years before his deportation, quickly rising to a management position and exhibiting the traits of a “natural-born leader,” according to the farm owner. Canan also had a pathway to a green card, allowing permanent residence in the United States, because he had been the victim of a violent break-in to his home on the farm in 2022, and was cooperating with the state’s attorney to prosecute the perpetrator.

All of that went away when Canan and his partner were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after visiting friends at a farm in New York, just across Lake Champlain. Canan was subsequently arrested for a DUI in the Northeast Kingdom.

Canan and his partner testified he had never driven drunk before, but was feeling the stress of his interaction with ICE, compounded by the anniversary of a violent attack on his mother in 2021, which ultimately resulted in her death. Canan himself had fled Guatemala at 16 to escape criminal violence.

‘Lifting up the voices and the stories of Vermont residents’

An immigration court judge in Boston deported Canan despite the state of Vermont agreeing to put him into a diversion program on his pending DUI charges, which means the charges would not have gone on his record once he completed the program. The owner of the Irasburg farm also provided a glowing letter of recommendation for Canan to the immigration court, to no avail.

Canan was represented in immigration court by Vermont Law & Graduate School Professor Brett Stokes and a team of student lawyers in the school’s immigration clinic.

“Lifting up the voices and the stories of Vermont residents is what the reporters at the Free Press strive to do each day,” said Caitlyn Kelleher, New England Group Editor. “It is an honor to receive recognition for this work from our peers and the professional organization of NENPA. Additionally, we appreciate the courage that it took Bernardino Suchite Canan to tell his story to Dan. The stories of migrants are not just one for the U.S. southern border communities or big cities. Dan’s reporting shows the daily struggles of the undocumented immigrants living and working in Vermont.”

Lifting up the voices of Indigenous people

D’Ambrosio also won a first-place award last year in the History Reporting category for his story about Saswa and Conauda, two Potawatomi boys, ages 17 and 15, respectively, who were brought to Vermont in 1827 by a Baptist missionary to study at Castleton Medical College, the first private medical school in the nation.

Within four years, by 1831, both boys would be dead from tuberculosis, and their stories would recede into obscurity for nearly two centuries, until an investigation of Indian Boarding Schools by the U.S. Department of the Interior was published in May 2022. The report included a brief reference to two Indian students in Castleton, which led to the Free Press investigation.

“This look at two teenage boys’ brief time in Vermont nearly two centuries ago does a masterful and nuanced job of telling the broader story of the country’s treatment of Indigenous people,” the competition judges wrote last year about D’Ambrosio’s story.