The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Documentary ICE Doesn’t Want You to See

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has been given a broad mandate to round up undocumented immigrants. The agency is infamously unwelcoming to journalists, but two filmmakers managed to get unprecedented access to its employees and detention facilities. Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz discuss how they got this closeup look at the agency as it developed ever-harsher policies designed to deter immigrants. Schwarz tells Jonathan Blitzer, who covers immigration for the magazine, that “if [ICE] can make life difficult enough, if [it] can send these messages . . . that this is the hell you’re going to get, then [they’ll] make these people leave.”     The documentary, “Immigration Nation,” is available on Netflix. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Under the Trump administration, the federal law enforcement agency known as ICE, immigration and customs enforcement, has been given a broad mandate to round up undocumented immigrants and with very little accountability. We don't see much into the inner workings of ICE because journalists just aren't given that much access. But the new documentary series on Netflix called Immigration Nation is an exception to the rule.

Filmmakers were given access to ICE and its personnel for more than three years, which is just unprecedented. The New York Times reported that ICE was so unhappy with the documentary that they tried to delay the release until after the election, though ICE has denied. this. The New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer, who covers immigration, sat down with Christina Claudeau and Shaul Schwartz, the directors of Immigration Nation. There are so many places where I could start, but it seems to me that maybe the place

for us to begin is at the beginning, as I and every other immigration reporter in the country can attest, getting ICE to allow journalists any measure of access, even the most limited forms of access is notoriously difficult. Tell me about your initial conversation with ICE when you first made this pitch to them. I mean, how did you, how did you represent the project and what was their initial response? It seems like they were open to this, obviously. Yeah, they were. It was kind of an extraordinary way in. I had worked with a local public's affairs person for ICE in Arizona. way back in 2011. And during that coverage, we kind of became friends.

And we stayed in touch. And during the Obama years, I had actually pitched the I spokesman who had climbed in the ranks down in that time to do a show about immigration. And it was kind of, when I say pitched, it was really kind of in a bar unofficially. And ultimately it was like a no-go. when Trump got elected, me and Christina fought about this opportunity and he said, why don't we go and meet this ice spokesman for lunch and see if there's a change, given how the administration was right off the bat, pretty aggressive and of course notoriously

during the campaign aggressive about immigration, we said, look, there's going to be a lot more heat, not knowing how right we would be. And we would like to show a portrait of your agents and what it looks like under this administration and what kind of struggles come to light. And that basically got us off to a couple of months of legal negotiations to set the multimedia agreement that kind of let us start the project. We realized that we want to tell larger immigration story and want to tell the story both of the enforcers and then forced. But we wanted it to start from inside the system because we thought that was so unique. And it really hit us when we were in El Paso. We knew it was unique, but it really hit us when we were in Paso detention center

doing children's separation. We were like, the whole country is talking about this. Nobody could get near this place. And here we are, just kind of walking around, talking to these people. Yeah. But tell me, because it's now been widely reported, at a certain point, your relationship with ICE got tense or tenser when it became clear that they were unhappy with what was due to come out. When did that start? Did that only happen at the very end when they saw the footage? Or were there changes along the way where you began to sense a kind of restiveness growing

on their end? It really started during the review process. I think all the way up to that point, you know, we had a really good relationship within the local field offices of ICE. and the Public Affairs Office. And so I think it was when the review process, when they started seeing how we were portraying the agency, they, you know, it was holding a mirror up to them,

and I think they didn't like what they saw. And they really, according to the contract we made, had a right to factual inaccurances and to law enforcement sensitivities and to privacy violations. Privacy violations. but we started receiving calls that were clear that they were unhappy. The calls became threatening of subpoenas, of different kind of things that were way out of line. Even right off the first episodes, there were specific scenes that they had, in our opinion,

and ultimately it would prove legally not to hold waters. They would ask very poor legal excuses. of why we should take out a whole scene. And ultimately, you know, because we had the resources and because we had the legal support, we were able to overcome all the challenges that they pushed back on. And I think that's the thing to note is that really what we put out in the world is the exact, almost very closely to what we envisioned it to be

and what we created. Christina Klajou and Shaul Schwartz talking with Jonathan Blitzer. Their conversation continues in a moment. Throughout the series, you follow not just ICE officers, but also families, immigrant families, who've been caught in the enforcement dragnet. One of them is a Guatemalan father named Bernardo Aravalo. He had been separated from his son of the border. He is alone in detention. And just physically, I mean, his eyes are bloodshot. He has this vacant expression on his face. He seems hollowed out. He shudders almost as he speaks. That to me is one.

One of the things that was so absolutely gutting about meeting parents who had been separated from their children, it was as though a part of their own bodies had been, you know, amputated. It's just so bracing visually to see. I wonder when you train the camera on him the first time, if that was something that really kind of caught you. Yeah, I mean, you know, we had the opportunity to be inside the detention center when family separation and the zero tolerance policy was initially being. enacted, you know, a month after or so. And I remember us not really knowing the extent of what

was happening. And then to enter a room in the holding cell and the officer to ask how many people here had been separated from their family and 18 out of 20 of them raised their hand. Yeah. And just the, for us, just the sheer like, what do you mean that they're all separated from their family? And then the opportunity and you just saw like the unknowing and the the hopelessness and in them, just like you said, the harrowing out and the sunken eyes and that a part of them had been taken away. And I think the worst thing about it is they didn't have any information. You know, Jose had been the other character that we follow. He had been separated for 30 days already or 27 days and had no idea where his child was. And I think that was

the moments that is just heartbreaking is that, You start to see these change in policies and how quickly they were being enacted and how that was happening. But to hear her father just cry out for the fact that he has no idea where his kid is and he has no way of getting hold of him was heartbreaking. And in Bernardo's case, what you both capture so well and I think is really a highlight of the series is also just the cascading trauma of that separation. And even when Bernardo is eventually released and reunited with his son, there's this really interesting moment where we see Bernardo again with his son. Eric? He looks like a different person.

He seems to have almost re-inhabited himself. He's smiling. We hear him laugh for the first time. But now he's on the phone with his wife, whom you've also been following, I thought, quite brilliantly, as she's with the rest of the family in Guatemala. And they're talking on a video. And you can see Leonardo is smiling and is cheery and is already now floating the idea of his wife and the rest of the family coming to visit. And she, his wife, isn't smiling.

Canzada, my dear. Canzada, but hermosa. And she seems even slightly resentful. And here he's been in detention for eight months and obviously through no fault of his own, But that means that he's out of circulation and that she's having to take care of the family. That just struck me as something incredibly powerful that you were able to capture and that you could only capture by spending extended time with these families. Yeah, it's true.

And I think at the beginning it was very important for us to amplify and to illuminate the effects that it didn't only have on those that are detained. But as you said, the cascading effect of what happens to, the family around them. And I think that toll that it had on the family back home and the son, who actually remember the conversation we had with him very initially when he got to Houston to his aunts and how he actually put the blame on himself in not so many words that he felt it was his fault that they were separated at the border. And so I think overall it just became this, it was really important for us to show that the human toll and the human cost of these policies

is much bigger than, you know, you see as it's written on paper. There seem to have been, and this is something ICE agents and other would talk about in their cars waiting, and this thought that came from the top. If we can make life difficult enough, if we can send these messages, which is, I think, what children's separation was all about that this is the hell you're going to get, then we're just going to make these people leave. And one, when you actually look at the people it affects, that is just unbearable. And two, what it really did in our perspective is not, I mean, there's not less undocumented people in this country.

They are just deeper in the shadows. So I think what it achieved is maybe people don't come. to their court hearings, or maybe if they see a crime around the corner or a woman's beat by her husband and they're undocumented, they won't call the police. Let me ask about your sense of some of the ICE officers you spoke to. One scene that particularly stood out for me was an interview you did with an officer named Christian, who's a supervisor at ICE, who has authority over what's called the non-detained docket, so the three million people in the country who are on on ICE's radar who come in to check in with ICE,

but who are not presently detained. There is an inherent kind of, I won't say joy, but satisfaction in moving some of the people that I know, regardless of what public sentiment is, don't belong in this country. And obviously one of the trends under the Trump administration is that these people who are trying to play by the rules,

now that they're in the U.S., are in the eyes of the administration, sort of low-hanging fruit. Easy people to arrest, easy people to deport, because here they are actually coming in and showing themselves to ICE officers. And Christian at one point says to you both, I don't remove anyone. The judge does. For all intense purposes, I'm the taxi driver that takes them from point A to point B.

Or I'm the person that's going to execute that order. How common was that sentiment among ICE officers that you spoke to? It seemed to me that that was a real through line in how they spoke. It was very common. You know, there was that and there was I'm just doing my job. You know, if you want to change the laws, you know, Congress is the one that changes them. And, you know, at times I always wanted through the whole production, I wanted there to be somebody to speak to me more about like what that really means. But at times you just felt like they were afraid to talk any deeper because they would be seen not supporting the mission.

that they were mandated to do. Is your sense that you didn't hear any of them going off of this script because of a fear of being, of being found afoul of the ICE mission? Or is there maybe just not that level of interiority in depth to how they think about their jobs? Both. I think both. I really do. I think, I mean, that's a question that, like, I've grappled with a lot.

And I do think that it's, you know, it's both that they don't want to, seem like they're skewing from the mission and also that they just they they seem like they're removed from the bigger picture it's it's not comfortable it's easier to just do my job and with that said you know on the other side i think if you deal with this day to day day day there's a toll you you get a little kind of desensitized so You know, we did see a lot of emboldenedness, and I think in DHS, because of the shakeups, because of the administration, and because sort of the bullies kind of have been gratified to the top in the years we spent in ice, we saw some of that. But we did see people who dear, you know, have self-look or at least we want to recognize that their job is at times very complex. I could talk to you for hours more.

Right. Thank you both so much for taking the time to chat with me. And congratulations again on the series. Thank you so much for this. We really appreciate. We really appreciate it. Joel Schwartz and Christina Klazhou, the directors of the documentary series,

Immigration Nation. It's on Netflix. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for this week. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards,

with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutini, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calliola, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putuguello, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mayn. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.

Thank you.