Michael Squires is ProPublica’s Southwest editor. He joined ProPublica from The Arizona Republic, where he was the investigative editor. While there he conceived of and ran a two-year investigation of special interests’ use of fill-in-the-blank legislation to spread their agendas. It found that at least 10,000 bills in statehouses nationwide had been copied from draft language written by special interests, representing the nation’s largest unreported influence campaign. The project, a collaboration among the Republic, USA Today and the Center for Public Integrity, won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, among other awards.
Squires also helped shape key elements of the Republic and USA Today’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning project “The Wall,” including its examination of human smuggling and the federal government’s failure to account for all migrant deaths on the southwest border. He previously spent 10 years working in Las Vegas as a reporter, columnist and editor leading teams covering state and federal policy and politics. 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.
