‘OITNB’ gets serious on immigration
Spoiler alert! Contains details about the seventh and final season of Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” now streaming.
The most heartbreaking story lines of the final “Orange Is the New Black” season happened outside the walls of Litchfield Penitentiary.
The Netflix prison drama compassionately tackles immigration through a group of characters who are sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.
Among them are freed inmate Maritza (Diane Guerrero), who is rearrested during an ICE nightclub raid and deported after learning she and her estranged mother never were American citizens.
Also targeted: Blanca (Laura Gómez), who was sent to the detention center after her release from Litchfield
last season and successfully argues for her illegal-entry conviction to be overturned. She later is granted a green card to stay in the U.S. but decides to return to the Dominican Republic to be with her boyfriend.
And new character Karla (Karina Arroyave), a widowed mother separated from her two young sons, is forced to represent herself in court and eventually is deported to El Salvador. In the series finale, she tries to cross the border into the United States with a group of migrants but suffers a fall that injures her leg and is left stranded in the desert alone with an uncertain fate.
You might think these new story lines were inspired directly by headlines about the U.S.-Mexico border crisis and child separation. Yet “Orange” executive producer Tara Herrmann says the desire to tackle immigration has been percolating for years.
“There’s a world where there could be an entire series about this because sadly, the crossovers between prison and immigration processing centers are too scary,” Herrmann says. Visiting a center in Los Angeles to research and talk to people, “it was shocking for us to see how much more stark life was for these detainees than it is even for inmates. There were no personal items and a lack of social services. All of them were ask
ing to see doctors and for us to pass along information to family members. Basic needs were not being met.
“This was months before the conversation really started heating up like it has been recently. So for us, it was like, ‘Whoa, this is real,’ and as it started progressing in the news media, too, we were validated in our feelings, sadly.”
Some of the most emotional scenes in the new season focus on phone calls among Karla and her sons as she promises to do whatever it takes to be reunited with them and urges them to take care of each other in foster care. Through the character, the writers hoped to convey the “irreparable trauma” of mothers being away from their kids.
“The injustice is that she came here for a better life, and she and her family were, by all means, upstanding citizens,” Herrmann says.
“She was coming from a very dangerous place and didn’t want her kids to be there.
“And the system says: ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll keep your kids, but you can go figure it out.’ We need a better system.”
One of the biggest hurdles facing Karla, Blanca and Maritza is the lack of access to effective legal counsel and unfamiliarity with their rights, which Gómez says is a very real problem facing many detainees.
With organizations such as Freedom for Immigrants, which is featured in the show, “the first thing they try to do is give people information about such rights because there is an abuse of power that is occurring,” says Gómez, who was raised in the Dominican Republic. “There’s also the uncertainty that so many of these people are going through that puts them in a vulnerable position. (These characters) are like the three different faces of what’s happening to so many undocumented people.”
Ultimately, she hopes that the focus on immigration in Season 7 will help bring empathy.
“Through these fictional characters that (viewers) love, they’re getting information about a reality that is even harder, because it’s real for those people who are desperate and fleeing their countries for a reason,” Gómez says.
“I hope for people to get curious and find information . ... I wish for people to start talking about human beings and not just ‘illegals.’ ”