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Hello and welcome to The Excerpt excerpt I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Thursday December 7th, 2023 and this is a special episode of the excerpt. Migrants are dying at numbers never seen before at the Port of Patrol's El Paso

sector.

That's the area surrounding El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico.

148 migrants lost their lives there in the year ending September 30th.

It's a huge surge from six migrant deaths recorded in 2017.

In response to the immigration crisis, officials in the US and Mexico are doubling

down on increasingly restrictive, often cruel border policies, while climate changes

pushing border land temperatures to deadly heights.

Migrants are now facing intensifying risks at what the United Nations is deemed the world's most dangerous border.

USA Today immigration reporter Lauren Veigran joins us now to talk about her reporting in a year

long El Paso Times investigation that found officials

ill-equipped to respond to the crisis.

Lauren, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So what did your investigation uncover about the failures and gaps in the response and the part of

local government agencies here in the U.S.?

Well, Dana, it was a really shocking year here in the US? Well Dana it was a really shocking year here in the El Paso

region. It started in March when a fire inside a migrant detention center on the

Mexican side of the border in Ciudad Juarez killed 40 men.

...