Overlooked

A humanitarian crisis is overwhelming South Texas as migrants continue to die trying to cross the United States-Mexico border. In Episode 1 of Overlooked, VICE follows forensic anthropologist Kate Spradley and her team to Brooks County, one of the deadliest stretches of the Texas migration corridor, as they exhume the bodies of migrants in hopes of identifying them for their families, and highlighting how Texas law is not being followed in some counties.

The United States has the highest rate of pregnancy-related deaths among developed nations, and the situation is far worse in rural parts of the country. In Episode 2 of Overlooked, VICE heads to Georgia, the epicenter of the country's maternal mortality crisis, following two OBGYN doctors responding to the rapid closures of labor and delivery units in the state.

A historic community built by formerly enslaved people has become a ghost town after a majority of its residents took voluntary home buyouts offered by a South African petrochemical company looking to expand its plant. The residents thought they were getting fair deals for their homes but some now feel Sasol's voluntary property purchase program amounted to land theft. In Episode 3 of Overlooked, VICE heads to Mossville, Louisiana, following a human rights attorney investigating what really took place and how Mossville residents were financially and emotionally impacted by Sasol's deal.

The U.S. military contracts one of the largest hazardous waste handlers in North America to burn millions of pounds of munitions near a low-income and predominantly Black community in Louisiana called Colfax. The facility, Clean Harbors Colfax LLC, is the only commercial facility in the country allowed to open burn munitions waste such as HEI cartridges, propellants and even fireworks from Disneyland with little environmental emissions controls, and has been doing so since the 80s to the detriment of the people who live nearby. Residents of Colfax are complaining that the toxic air that moves off-site into their homes and the contaminants that seeps into their soil and groundwater is making them sick with skin rashes, breathing problems and cancer.

In 1993, the Midwestern United States was submerged by extreme rainfall and historic flooding that resulted in tens of deaths, billions of dollars in damages, and a breach of levees up and down the Mississippi River. In the small river town of Quincy, Illinois, 24-year-old James Scott was convicted under an obscure 1979 Missouri law for intentionally "causing a catastrophe". His alleged crime was causing the West Quincy levee to fail and his alleged motive was to strand his wife on the other side of the river so he could be free to party and go fishing with his friends. Though no one died in this levee breach, James is the first and only person in Missouri history convicted under this law and is currently serving a life sentence.