'These people aren't just statistics': behind the year's most personal look at immigration
Imagine you wake up, and your father is gone, Awa Sow says in the first moments of Living Undocumented, Netflix’s six-part series on life outside the punishing, skyscraping walls of American citizenship. Sow’s name is not yet marked in the show, but her gaze is already arresting, singular. “You can watch a documentary and you can say: well, this is too bad,” she says. “But at the end of the day, it’s just something that you’re watching on TV. And you can turn that off, and you can go about your life.”
Sow points to one of the great ironies of immigration coverage under Trump, for those not personally engaged with the system, documented or undocumented: you’re frequently watching, maybe imagining, rarely engaging on a human-to-human level. Living Undocumented, executive produced by the Mexican-American pop star Selena Gomez, seeks to address this detachment, as best as a documentary can, through the focus on individual, day-by-day stories. The series follows eight families navigating life as undocumented people under the Trump administration, whose zero tolerance policy targets all non-citizens – men, women, children – in the United States.
America at large has certainly been watching the cruel impact of zero tolerance, which has cyclically dominated headlines since “build the wall” became the rallying cry of Trump’s presidential campaign. Living Undocumented, meanwhile, stakes out a different territory than journalistic documentary – less necessarily blaring, more personal and sprawling. The series was intended as “a more comprehensive story of immigration, but directly from the immigrants themselves”, the director Aaron Saidman said in an interview with the Guardian.
Saidman and his directing partner, Anna Chai, first conceived of the project in 2017, after receiving footage of the Nigerian chef Tunde Wey, who was detained for months in a Texas immigration facility. Wey’s story – 20 years and an acclaimed culinary career in the US yet still threatened with deportation – “just sparked a conversation internally at our production company”, Saidman said. They started to wonder: what other stories were out there? “How much do people really understand about the complexity of the issue? And is there a series that we could make that would explore all of these different stories in all of their facets?”
Saidman, Chai and their production team began making inquiries, “exhausting all options”, said Chai, to find undocumented people who would participate in filming – Facebook groups and Twitter, news stories, immigration lawyers and advocacy groups. They deliberately sought a cast from across the US, with different socioeconomic, national and ethnic backgrounds. “It would’ve been very easy to cast this primarily from people from Mexico and Central America,” said Chai. “But the immigration situation is not just that. It’s not a border issue; it’s affecting people from all over the world.”
Living Undocumented thus follows, over the summer of 2018, families from a range of backgrounds: Luis and Kenia, both from Honduras, seeking to be together after Ice detains a pregnant Kenia for deportation; Ron and Karen, who fled violence in Tel Aviv and have raised a family and run a business for 17 years in Los Angeles; Alejandra Juarez, who has spent 20 years in Florida with her husband, an ex-marine and Trump voter, facing deportation to Mexico. There’s Vinny, a Laotian refugee in South Carolina whose regular Ice check-in is likely to separate him from his wife and young daughter. The Dunoyer family, refugees from Colombian narco-guerrillas in San Diego, California, whose two teenage sons, Pablo and Camilo, use social media to draw attention to their case – a direct result of protections stripped under Trump. Miguel and Maria, Hondurans in Baltimore seeking to be reunited with their 12-year-old niece, detained at the border. Eddie Fernandez, a Mexican immigrant and now businessman in Minnesota, permanently barred from US citizenship because of one false citizenship claim as a teen. And the Sow family, from Mauritania and now Ohio, whose father Amadou is trapped indefinitely in detainment and legal limbo.
After initial filming, Saidman and Chai showed a sizzle reel to Gomez, who “had quite an emotional reaction to it”, said Saidman. “It touched her, and it moved her and it made her want to be involved.” Gomez, whose paternal grandparents came to Texas from Mexico in the 1970s, and her mother, Mandy Teefey, helped shepherd the project at Netflix.
Each of Living Undocumented’s portraits portrays a different angle of a system with many tentacles of intimidation, obfuscation and double binds; Miguel can’t collect his niece without his Honduran ID, for example, but that ID has been confiscated in his own detainment. Making the series was a crash course in confusion, said Chai. “English is my first language and I’m lucky enough to have a college degree, and I found it super confusing.”
“The deeper that we got into research and the more we started preparing to shoot the show,” Saidman said, “the more Kafka-esque the immigration system appeared to be and revealed itself to be.”
In order to show, as Saidman said, “the immigration system itself, and how complicated and daunting and intimidating that system is for the immigrants who are going through it”, Living Undocumented also features immigration attorneys, advocates and journalists to help contextualize and explain America’s confounding immigration system, from legal asylum to personal stays to deportation hearings. The expert commentary gives the series the effect of an adapted longform article – personal narrative journey illuminating baffling bureaucracy.
Still, despite the obviously political implications of the show’s stories, Saidman, Chai and Gomez, in an op-ed for Time, maintain that the series is personal in intent and message. “This was specifically designed to not be a political story,” said Saidman. “This is meant to be a human interest story where you can get a sense of what these people are really going through.”
“We all hope that this can add to the conversation, and start a conversation about what’s working, what’s not working, what we could do to potentially improve it,” said Chai.
“As a Mexican-American woman I feel a responsibility to use my platform to be a voice for people who are too afraid to speak,” Gomez wrote in TIME. “And I hope that getting to know these eight families and their stories will inspire people to be more compassionate, and to learn more about immigration and form their own opinion.” She wrote that she recently met with Camilo Dunoyer, now in hiding after his father was deported in August, whose greatest fear is not returning to Colombia, but being reduced to a statistic.
It’s a concern Saidman and Chai said informed the entire intent of Living Undocumented, and the gap in conversation they hope to fill. “People respond to personal stories,” Saidman said. “Hopefully this series will help accomplish this, that they understand that these people aren’t just statistics.”
Living Undocumented is now available on Netflix