After earning a degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he became an ABC News correspondent for 20/20, Nightline and Good Morning America.

For “20/20,” Quiñones extensively reported on Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillen, who was brutally murdered and sparked a #MeToo movement in the military.

In 2021, Quiñones conducted the first exclusive network television interview with Mexican professional boxer Canelo Álvarez, who won multiple world championships in four different weight classes.

The report was featured in a primetime ABC News Hispanic Heritage Month special and on “Nightline.” While Quiñones covered the Chilean miners’ disaster in 2010, he was the first journalist out of thousands to get an exclusive interview with the first survivor, Mario Sepulveda, who spoke about their horrendous ordeal.

Quiñones extensively covered a religious sect in northern Arizona that forced its young female members to participate in polygamous marriages.

Quiñones’ reports for “20/20” include an in-depth look at the unprecedented lawsuit against the Cuban government by a woman who claimed she unknowingly married a spy and an exclusive interview with a Florida teenager who brutally killed her adoptive mother.

He was honored with a Gabriel Award for his poignant report that followed a young man to Colombia as he made an emotional journey to reunite with his birth mother after two decades.

During the 1980s, he spent nearly a decade in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama, reporting for “World News Tonight.” Quiñones won seven national Emmy®Awards for his work on “Primetime Live,” “Burning Questions” and “20/20.” He received an Emmy for his coverage of the Congo’s virgin rainforest, which also won the Ark Trust Wildlife Award, and in 1990, he received an Emmy for “Window in the Past,” a look at the Yanomamo Indians.

In 2022, Quiñones received the Lifetime Achievement Award from MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund), the country’s oldest and most prominent Latino civil rights organization; was named a “Fellow of the Society” by the Society of Professional Journalists; and received the President’s Award for Journalism Excellence from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.