Two weeks after the host of WLRN’s Sundial show reported allegations of discrimination and anti-Hispanic sentiment to his employers at the South Florida public radio station, WLRN canceled the show and fired host Carlos Frias and his team, Frias’ attorney told the Miami Herald.

Frias on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations and U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging WLRN discriminated against him.

Frias, 48, a former food editor at the Miami Herald, was hired by WLRN in 2022. For nearly two years, he hosted the local talk show Sundial, which featured interviews with local artists, writers and other prominent individuals.

Until Feb. 1, when WLRN’s Vice President of News Sergio Bustos ousted Frias and the two producers of Sundial, the discrimination filing read.

On WLRN’s website, it says the program was canceled on Feb. 2.

WLRN CEO John LaBonia did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

In a statement, WLRN said its decision was based on a want to focus resources in the newsroom and expand an investigative journalism team, Axios reported.

Frias said he did not believe the loss of his show and job was from a need to shift resources but instead the product of anti-Latino comments, he wrote in the filing.

“To say that a program on the culture of Miami is too Latino… of course it’s Latino,” lawyer William R. Amlong, Frias’ attorney, said. “Miami is Latino.”

‘Sounding very Latino’

In August, Caitie Muñoz, Frias’ boss, told one of Sundial’s producers that the show was “sounding very Latino,” the filing read.

Muñoz created a spreadsheet showing the ethnicity of people invited on the show but only those who mentioned having Latino or Hispanic roots during an episode, the filing read.

When Frias asked a supervisor about the ethnicity spreadsheet, Peter Maerz, WLRN’s vice president of radio, said the show was making a certain group of listeners uncomfortable, Frias wrote in the filing.

“[Maerz] responded that we had to be considerate of people’s ‘cultural comfort zones,’ which I understood to mean white people were being made uncomfortable by how diverse our show was (as is our Miami home),” Frias wrote in the filing.

Amlong told the Herald that there had been other employees in the past who complained about the station being “anti-Latino.”

In December, Frias wrote that he received a racist email from an anonymous listener. When he shared that on his social media as an example of the racial discrimination that comes with his job and to boast about his hard work, Frias said in the filing that he was officially reprimanded and disciplined.

Frias said Bustos scolded him for “airing our dirty laundry” in an email and insisted he take down the post, which Frias did.

This prompted him to file a complaint with his Human Resources representative, and in a meeting on Jan. 22, he laid out all the discrimination he alleged he and his staff have received.

A week later, Frias and his staff were let go.

‘Internal soul-searching’

Under federal law, WLRN has 180 days to conduct an investigation into claims of discrimination before Frias can file a lawsuit against the station.

“I don’t know how the litigation is going to develop,” Amlong said. “I would expect that there would be some internal soul-searching.”

Amlong also said his team will be looking into possible First Amendment violations.