Molly O’Toole is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist working on The Route, a nonfiction book that follows the world’s longest human migration to the United States. Currently a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, O’Toole most recently was an immigration and security reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She has taught at Cornell University and the Poynter Institute and has been a fellow at MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, George Washington University, and the Logan Nonfiction Program. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Foreign Policy and The Atlantic’s Defense One. From Latin America to South Asia, O’Toole has written for outlets such as the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Associated Press, Reuters, and more.
O’Toole and co-contributor Emily Green were awarded the first-ever Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting in 2020 with This American Life, and she also served as a juror for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. Her work has been recognized by the Livingston Awards, the National Press Club, the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and the Silvers Grants for Work in Progress, among others.
O’Toole’s forthcoming book, as well as an accompanying podcast, traces the new migrant underground, a deadly gauntlet for global refugees that stretches from Brazil to the U.S. border, carved out by the fixers and officials cashing in on a billion-dollar black market and held together by the thread of the American dream. Crown Publishing, a Penguin Random House imprint, will publish The Route in 2025.
O’Toole is a graduate of Cornell and New York University, but she will always be Californian.
Selected Work
- ‘Sitting ducks for organized crime’: How Biden border policy fuels migrant kidnapping, extortion: An article in the Los Angeles Times about Title 42, a controversial border policy enacted by President Donald Trump, which was continued and expanded by President Joe Biden.
- The Nepali man who came back from the dead: A reporting odyssey from Nepal to Saudi Arabia and back in order to solve the mystery of how a migrant worker died and came back to life for the Los Angeles Times.
- The Out Crowd: Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast from the Los Angeles Times in collaboration with This American Life and Emily Green, which reported from the frontlines of the Trump administration's "Remain in Mexico" asylum policy.