Journalist Abby Martin travels the US-Mexico border for The Empire Files, tracing a body count that has topped 7,000 human remains recovered in Arizona alone since 1994. She sets that figure against NAFTA's economic fallout, which pushed migration north, and against a border enforcement buildup under the Obama administration that deported nearly two million people in five years and forced crossers onto more remote, deadlier routes. Martin films with the volunteer group No More Deaths as they leave water and supplies in the desert, and interviews people describing prosecution for littering or aiding illegal entry for doing so. Hidden camera footage takes viewers inside Operation Streamline, the 2005 policy that mass-prosecutes border crossers through assembly-line court hearings, feeding a private prison system in Texas that has taken in over 1.2 billion dollars. The film argues the deaths are not accidental but the predictable result of policy choices, laying out the deportation and detention apparatus piece by piece rather than treating the border as an abstract political flashpoint.