Our Team

Melissa del Bosque is Co-founder and Executive Director of The Border Chronicle. Melissa has written about the U.S.-Mexico border since 1998 for various media outlets, including ProPublica, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Texas Observer, and The Intercept.

Her work has been recognized with numerous U.S. and international journalism awards, including a Gabo Award and the Internacional Rey de España de Periodismo award, as the U.S.-Mexico investigations editor for Lighthouse Reports. In 2020, del Bosque received the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award as part of a ProPublica group reporting project “Inside the Border Patrol.” In 2016, she received the Hillman Prize for her investigative feature “Death on Sevenmile Road” about the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2015, del Bosque’s four-part series with The Guardian on migrant deaths in South Texas won an Emmy and a National Magazine Award. 

Del Bosque is also the author of Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty. She has a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master’s in Public Health from the Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health, and a Bachelor’s in poetry and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

In her spare time, Melissa loves to travel, spend time with her family, and explore the Sonoran Desert.

Todd Miller is Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of The Border Chronicle. He is the author of four books that examine border militarization and its externalization, surveillance technology and industry, climate change, and the search for alternatives. His books include Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders (City Lights, 2021) Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World (Verso, 2019),  Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights, 2017), and Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (City Lights, 2014).

Todd’s forthcoming book is a deep examination of water as a border issue in an age of climate-induced heat waves and drought. It will be published by Seven Stories Press in 2027.

Besides The Border Chronicle, articles by Todd have appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Guernica, TomDispatch, and Al Jazeera English, among other places. He has also authored and co-authored reports on border surveillance, the border industrial complex, and climate change for the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, where he is a fellow.

Todd’s book Storming the Wall received the Izzy Award in 2018 for “path-breaking and in-depth reporting.” He also received first place in “Community immigration reporting” by the Arizona Press Club in 2013. Todd has a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies and Journalism from Prescott College, where he is also an adjunct professor.

In his spare time, Todd likes to travel, read, philosophize, and hang out with his two kids—whether it be going to a dance recital or being a basketball coach.

Caroline Tracey covers the environment and arts and culture for The Border Chronicle. She is the author of the book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, a blend of environmental reportage and memoir published in March 2026 by W.W. Norton.

Outside of The Border Chronicle, Caroline’s reporting about the US Southwest, Mexico, and the borderlands has appeared in the New Yorker, n+1, New York Review of Books, High Country News, as well as in Spanish in Mexico’s Nexos. Her literary and art criticism appears in the Nation, the New Republic, and elsewhere, and has been commissioned by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art.

Caroline’s work has received a Fulbright fellowship, the Waterston Prize for Desert Writing, the Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Journalism and Human and Civil Rights, a Silvers Foundation Work-in-Progress grant, and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other honors. In 2025 she received the inaugural On the Brinck | Places Prize for writing about the Southwest and in 2026 she received a State of the Art prize from Creative Capital. She holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley.

Outside of work, Caroline likes to spend her time reading, swimming, and walking her dog, Sandro.

Michael Gonzalez is a writer for The Border Chronicle, based in Brownsville, Texas, where he covers issues affecting border residents in the Rio Grande Valley.

He also works as an independent photojournalist covering stories that range from immigration and border topics to environmental issues and politics. Michael has freelanced for various publications such as The Texas Tribune, The Associated Press, NRC, Getty Images, and the European Pressphoto Agency. As a certified drone pilot, he often incorporates aerial imagery into his reporting to provide greater context for stories about the border wall, the Rio Grande, and other issues affecting the Rio Grande Valley.

Outside of work, he enjoys traveling the world with his wife, watching historical documentaries, and printing black-and-white photos in his darkroom.

Brenda Machado is in charge of Digital Strategy and Audience Engagement at The Border Chronicle, where she manages the outlet’s social media presence and helps translate independent, on-the-ground border journalism into content that reaches new readers. Based in Tucson, Arizona, she is a candidate for a dual Master of Arts in Latin American Studies and Bilingual Journalism at the University of Arizona, building on a bachelor’s degree in Global Studies with a focus on human rights, refugees, and immigration.

Before joining The Border Chronicle, Brenda worked as a Communications Intern with the ACLU of Arizona and as a Graduate Multimedia Specialist with the University of Arizona’s Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry. Her path into border journalism runs through direct service as well, as a Family Reunification Specialist with the International Rescue Committee and a Site Lead at Casa Alitas in Tucson, where she worked with asylum seekers and refugee families navigating the immigration system. Fluent in English and Spanish, she brings that on-the-ground experience with border communities to her work, amplifying The Border Chronicle’s bilingual coverage of immigration, environment, and border militarization.

Pablo Morales is the copy editor for The Border Chronicle and a longtime editor in journalistic and scholarly publishing. Over 25 years, his career has been defined by a commitment to helping authors communicate complex ideas with clarity, precision, and intellectual rigor while guiding publications through every stage of the editorial and production process. Pablo’s career began in New York at PBS and the Village Voice newspaper, followed by an editor-in-chief position at NACLA Report on the Americas, an award-winning publication on Latin American and Caribbean politics, social movements, and international relations. Since then, he has freelanced for various magazine and book publishers, including Condé Nast, Time Warner, and the University of California Press. Currently, Pablo serves as managing editor of American Ethnologist, a leading peer-reviewed journal in cultural anthropology. 

In his spare time, he enjoys reading novels, perfecting his pancake technique, and taking his Yorkie on sniff walks.

Dugan is a geographer and photographer based in Tucson, Arizona. He is currently a PhD student in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. His research explores how police power produces and shapes social landscapes, from border regimes to housing markets to a range of affective economies.

Since 2023, he has been working to produce a visual archive of security infrastructure throughout the US-Mexico borderlands, a project that entails photographing, mapping, and studying the rapidly expanding ‘system of systems’ of U.S. border surveillance and security infrastructure both along the length of the US-Mexico border and in “interior” environments like Tucson. Selected images and other material from this work can be found on his website, www.duganmeyer.com. He also spends time working with local community defense groups, hiking around the region with friends, making ceramics and other visual art, and talking to his cat Amistad.

Erin Patrick O’Connor is a video reporter and podcast producer working with The Border Chronicle, where he produces the bi-weekly podcast and social videos. O’Connor’s reporting centers on issues shaping the Southwest and the influence of climate change and access to natural resources.

Erin was previously a senior national video reporter for The Washington Post, covering climate, and immigration. In 2025, he covered Border Patrol and ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles, Charlotte, North Carolina and Minneapolis. Additionally, he has documented hurricanes, wildfires, regional battles over access to public lands, and even went on tour with Sinead O’Connor. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his coverage of the 2019 mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio and his contribution to The Post’s investigation into the DEA’s failed response to the production and trafficking of fentanyl in 2023, producing a short documentary about first responders in San Diego. In 2022, He was dispatched to Ukraine as Russian tanks began to move toward the capital city of Kyiv. O’Connor reported from the western city of Lviv, documenting the refugee crisis. 

He now spends his time hiking throughout southern Arizona, looking for beardless chinchweed and filming border wall construction.