Large-scale US surveillance is seriously hampering US-based journalists and lawyers in their work. Surveillance is undermining media freedom and the right to counsel, and ultimately obstructing the American people’s ability to hold their government to account, the groups said.

Robin Reineke, director of the Colibrí Center for Human Rights, holds the personal effects of unidentified border crossers. Such personal effects are kept at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in Tucson, Arizona, to match families with missing migrants who were last seen alive crossing the border. According to Reineke, from 1990 to 1999, an average of 12 remains of border crossers were brought into the Pima County Medical Examiner's office per year. From 2001 through the present, the average number of remains is 164. "There's been this discourse that security is the automatic obvious need on the border ... more walls, more border patrol, more surveillance, more unmanned aerial drones," she said. "That's the type of strategy that we saw change our landscape into one of death, and it's heartbreaking to see the same type of conversation happening now." This video is part of the feature Torn Apart: Families and US Immigration Reform.

Fermina Lopez Cash, a 47-year-old woman from Guatemala, sits in her home with a photo of her 13-year-old son, Omar, who died in July 2010 in the Arizona desert trying to cross the US-Mexico border to join her and his older siblings in Phoenix. Only 9 years old when she left, Lopez Cash said Omar begged to come to the US as well. A middle-aged woman offered to come with him, and they hired a "coyote" (smuggler) to take them across the border. Almost three years later, the remains of a teenage boy that had been found in the Arizona desert along with those of an older woman, were confirmed as those of Fermina's son.

Mike Wilson, a volunteer with the Tucson, Arizona-based Humane Borders, places containers of water in the desert in the hope of preventing more migrant deaths and leads search missions for families looking for loved ones. Wilson is a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, on whose reservation many of the migrants have died. Members of his tribe and the congregation he used to serve as a pastor, he said, have criticized him for trying to save lives of people who are breaking federal immigration laws. "As your pastor, I have to choose between two sets of law," he tells them. "Which law is above the other? Federal immigration laws or God's moral, universal law that you take care of the stranger?"