John Carlos Frey and PBS Need To Know team Win June Sidney Award for Exposing Epidemic of Migrant Deaths Along the Border | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

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John Carlos Frey and PBS Need To Know team Win June Sidney Award for Exposing Epidemic of Migrant Deaths Along the Border

John Carlos Frey and the team at PBS’ “Need to Know” (producer Brian Epstein, correspondent John Larson, editor Judith Starr Wolff) won the June Sidney Award for “Crossing the Line: Dying to Get Back,” a documentary about how U.S. immigration policies are killing increasing numbers of undocumented migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The documentary aired on PBS’ “Need to Know” and was produced with the support of the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute; it is the third in a three-part series on the Border Patrol.

The bleached bones of unnamed migrants are piling up in small town morgues along the border, even though unauthorized crossings are at a historic low. Over two thousand migrant deaths were reported between 1999 and 2012, and the true death toll may be even higher.

Crossings have become more dangerous because the U.S. Border Patrol has deliberately pushed cross-border traffic into inhospitable terrain where migrants risk death from heat stroke and exploitation by human traffickers. The Obama administration’s aggressive policy of deportation has created a new class of desperate migrants: people who have built lives and started families in the United States who find themselves deported to a country they left years earlier. Many of these migrants are willing to risk everything to get back, and some pay the ultimate price. 

Read my Backstory interview with Frey.