[3][4] Following the creation of Al Jazeera America on 2 January 2013, their factual department commissioned three award-winning documentary teams to produce original content for the channel.
[5] Newly formed Australian indie production company In Films were approached and despite geographical concerns, agreed to produce a series on undocumented immigration.
[9][1] The producers visited the Pima County morgue in Tucson after reading an article [10] about the number of unidentified migrants found every year in the Sonora Desert.
[15] The three migrant stories selected were: Omar grew up in the coffee plantations of El Porvenir, Guatemala, a poverty-stricken area just south of the Mexican border.
Through the work of Greg Hess' team at the Pima Country Medical Examiner's office, Fermina was finally reunited with her son.
Despite the valiant efforts of a fellow traveller who risked his life carrying her to Border Patrol agents, Maria died at the age of 39.
[18] Casting for the series began in mid-2013 and from over two thousand applicants, twelve participants were eventually vetted, undertook medical and psychological testing and whittled down to a final six.
Melder was angry and frustrated with the immigration system and government, unable to comprehend how there was 11 million undocumented people living in the United States.
A former write-in candidate for Governor of Illinois for his religiously conservative Constitution Party, he ran on a platform of cutting off health care, education and other government benefits to illegal immigrants.
Starting at the Pima Country morgue, the series follows the six participants as they visit the López, Sánchez, and Zelaya families, trek through jungles, and cross dangerous rivers, travel on top of El tren de la muerte (The Train of Death) also known as Las Bestia (The Beast), the train many undocumented migrants ride through southern Mexico, and navigate their way through the cartel-controlled city of Culiacán, Mexico.
The production team scouted a route through Mexico two months before the shoot and worked closely with security personnel to mitigate the dangers.
The second unit shot in Omar Chilel López's hometown of El Porvenir in Guatemala and at the treacherous river crossing at Tech Uman.
The next stage of the journey was Culiacán, a city in northwestern Mexico, controlled by the drug lord Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, and his Sinaloa Cartel.
Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times said: [I]t turns out there is a reason to watch Al Jazeera America.... Borderland is exploitative in a good way, using the ignorance of ordinary Americans to enlighten viewers about a problem so intractable that it's often easier not to look.