Michael Squires is ProPublica’s Southwest editor. Since joining ProPublica in 2021, his team has investigated the disproportionate impact of child welfare enforcement on communities of color, how the region’s historic drought is changing water policy, the questionable practices of cash home buying businesses, Colorado’s handling of child custody and the slow repatriation of Indigenous human remains, among other topics.

Before joining ProPublica, Squires conceived of and ran a two-year investigation of special interests’ use of fill-in-the-blank legislation to spread agendas to statehouses nationwide. “Copy, Paste, Legislate,” a collaboration with the Arizona Republic, USA Today and the Center for Public Integrity, won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, among other awards. Squires also shaped key elements of the Republic and USA Today’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning project “The Wall,” which examined President Donald Trump’s proposal to construct a 2,000-mile wall on the southern border. While a deputy managing editor at the Las Vegas Sun, he oversaw that newsroom’s investigation of patient harm in Nevada hospitals, which was a Pulitzer finalist and won the Goldsmith Prize.