Immigration documentary faces pushback, legal threats
In early 2017, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepared to carry out the hard-line agenda on which President Donald Trump had campaigned, agency leaders jumped at the chance to let two filmmakers give a behind-thescenes look at the process.
But as the documentary neared completion in recent months, the administration fought 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 organization’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 a 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 sixpart project called “Immigration Nation” over to ICE leadership in keeping with a contract they had signed with the agency.
Suddenly, the filmmakers say, the official overseeing 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 that the federal government would use its “full weight” to veto scenes it found objectionable. Several times, the filmmakers said, the official pointed out that it was their “little production company,” not the film’s $125 billion distributor, that would face consequences.
ICE press secretary Jenny L. Burke said the agency is “shocked by the mischaracterizations made by the production company,” and “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.