Max Salomon

Series Producer & Writer; Explorer, NGT

The field production for Border Wars posed a significant challenge for our production team. The stories in the field covered a huge expanse - the terrain of Arizona and New Mexico in which much of our story takes place is extremely vast and remote. Distances between locations often required hours of driving...along dirt roads not on the map…or miles on foot through the desert. Covering such a wide territory would have been impossible for a single crew in the time allotted. Producer Ray Telles asked if I might leave my Series Producer desk in D.C. behind and be willing to run a second unit for several days. Getting an excuse to get into the field is always a thrill. So I tossed my pen and notepad, Blackberry and laptop over my shoulder, grabbed a VariCam and headed out into the desert. I have to admit that what I experienced and saw from this privileged "front row seat" to the action fundamentally shifted my understanding of the immigration issue. Amidst the din of the immigration debate and the pundits’ rhetoric, the truth of what actually is going on our border with Mexico is easily lost in the public discourse. The US effort to secure the border has had unintended consequences. Since the 1990's we've been building a massive security fence... triple lines patrolled by SUV's, ATV's ... surveilled by watchtowers and cameras...illuminated by floodlights. The statistics show that where this massive barrier has gone up it's been extremely effective... in those areas (San Diego, El Paso, etc.) the number of crossings has dropped. But the number of migrants crossing into the US has continued to rise. The traffic has simply been funneled elsewhere. It has moved into areas that were once simply too dangerous and hard to cross...into the deserts and mountain wildernesses of a region dubbed “The Devil’s Highway”. The problem now is that thousands of migrants are entering a dangerous wilderness... one that they can't cross on their own... and it has often funneled them in to the hands of organized crime. What our nation's border patrol agents face now in securing the border is not simply unarmed migrants crossing on their own...they are battling a complex dangerous network of human traffickers.