Blowback for US migration expose
TV probe into secretive world of immigration enforcement meets resistance.
In early 2017, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepared to carry out the hardline agenda on which President Donald Trump had campaigned, agency leaders jumped at the chance to let two filmmakers give a behind-the-scenes look at the process. But as the documentary neared completion in recent months, the administration fought mightily to keep it from being released until after the 2020 election. After granting rare access to parts of the country’s powerful immigration enforcement machinery that are usually invisible to the public, administration officials threatened legal action and sought to block parts of it from seeing the light of day.
Some of the contentious scenes include ICE officers lying to immigrants to gain access to their homes and mocking them after taking them into custody. One shows an officer illegally picking the lock to an apartment building during a raid.
At town hall meetings captured on camera, agency spokesmen reassured the public that the organisation’s focus was on arresting and deporting immigrants who had committed serious crimes. But the filmmakers observed numerous occasions in which officers expressed satisfaction after being told by supervisors to arrest as many people as possible, even those without criminal records.
“Start taking collaterals, man,” a supervisor in New York said over speakerphone to an officer who was making street arrests as the filmmakers listened in. “I don’t care what you do, but bring at least two people,” he said.
The filmmakers, Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz, who are a couple, turned drafts of their six-part project called Immigration Nation over to ICE leadership in keeping with a contract they had signed with the agency. What they encountered next resembled what happened to Mary L Trump, the president’s niece, who was eventually sued in an unsuccessful attempt to stop her from publishing a memoir that revealed embarrassing details about the president and his associates.
Suddenly, Clusiau and Schwarz say, the official who oversaw the agency’s television and film department, with whom they had worked closely over nearly three years of filming, became combative.
The filmmakers discussed their conversations on the condition that the officials they dealt with not be named out of fear that it would escalate their conflict with the agency.
In heated phone calls and emails, they said, the official pushed to delay publication of the series, currently set to air on Netflix next month. He warned the federal government would use its “full weight” to veto scenes it found objectionable. Several times, the filmmakers said, the official pointed out it was their “little production company”, not the film’s US$125 billion (3.9 trillion baht) distributor, that would face consequences.
The filmmakers said they were told that the administration’s anger over the project came from “all the way to the top”.
Unnerved, the filmmakers said they began using an encrypted messaging service to communicate with their production team. They installed security cameras in their office and moved hard drives with raw film footage to a separate location, afraid of ICE’s increasingly aggressive tactics.
“Experiencing them is painful and scary and intimidating and at the same time angering and makes you want to fight to do the story,” Schwarz said.
Jenny L Burke, press secretary for ICE, said the agency “wholeheartedly disputes the allegations brought forward by filmmakers of this production”.
She said the agency pushed back against the film only within the confines of the agreement Schwarz had signed and that the couple, not the agency, caused delays in the review process. She added that in the many collaborations the agency had embarked on with other media outlets, ICE officials had never been accused of bullying.
The filmmakers’ lawyer, Victoria S Cook, negotiated a contract with strong protections for their journalistic independence. It allowed for ICE to review drafts of the series before it was published. But the agency was allowed to request changes only based on factual inaccuracies, violations of privacy rights or the inclusion of law enforcement tactics that could either hinder officers’ abilities to do their jobs or put them in danger. Matthew T Albence, the current acting director of ICE, signed on behalf of the government.
Over the next two and a half years, the couple filmed a sweeping look at the federal immigration enforcement system, discovering many inherent contradictions.
They followed Border Patrol tactical agents who took pride in rescuing migrants from deadly dehydration even as the agents acknowledged their tactics were pushing the migrants further into harm’s way. They showed how the government had at times evaluated the success of its border policies based not only on the number of migrants apprehended but also on the number who died while crossing.
They followed refugees who fled their home countries because their lives were in danger, who had been vetted over several years before their number was called for resettlement in the United States. The filmmakers showed that after Mr Trump was elected, many of those refugees with preliminarily approved cases were placed instead in indefinite administrative limbo to satisfy promises the president had made to cut refugee resettlement numbers.
They also tracked a grandmother who said she felt pressured during 17 months of detention to give up her asylum claim, which was based on death threats she had received in her home country. The filmmakers watched ICE officers on the front lines struggle with the effect of their work on immigrants and their families and cling to the notion that they were simply doing the job for which they were hired.
In the end, ICE’s leadership expressed frustration that the documentary, which was supposed to be about ICE officers, included the stories of so many immigrants.
The film showed several parents who were separated from their children at the border, including one father whose three-year-old son had been pulled away in tears.
In the end, the conflicts were resolved by lawyers on both sides. Ms Cook, the filmmakers’ lawyer, said her negotiations with government lawyers were much more amicable than those her clients faced when dealing with ICE.