National Immigration Reporter
NY Times
Caitlin reports:
In early 2017, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepared to carry out the hard-line agenda on which President 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 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 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, Ms. Clusiau and Mr. 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.
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Read Caitlin’s full article at the link.
The multi-part documentary begins airing on Netflix on August 3. You can watch the trailer at this link:
See firsthand how your tax dollars are being largely wasted on cruel, unnecessary terrorizing of ethnic communities and populating the “New American Gulag” — “enforcement” that in too many cases actually harms our economy and our society and certainly diminishes both our integrity and humanity as a nation.
Catlin’s concluding paragraphs are worth keeping in mind:
The filmmakers said they came away with some empathy for the ICE officers, but became convinced that the entire system was harmful to immigrants and their families.
The problem, they said, was summarized in the first episode by Becca Heller, the director of the International Refugee Assistance Project.
“Is a government agency evil? No. Is every single person inside ICE evil? No,” Ms. Heller told the filmmakers. “The brilliance of the system is that their job has been siphoned off in such a way that maybe what they see day to day seems justified, but when you add it up, all of the people just doing their job, it becomes this crazy terrorizing system.”
We have all been harmed by Trump’s racist-driven “weaponization” of DHS and the Immigration Courts, and that includes the DHS employees and the Immigration Court employees who are caught up in this grotesque, often illegal, and overall immoral abuse of government authority and resources.
We should also be concerned about the First Amendment implications of Trump’s attempts to misuse Government authority to manipulate the election in his favor by, once again, suppressing truth in reporting. Thank goodness we have courageous journalists like Caitlin and these filmmakers to keep exposing the ugly truth about the Trump/Miller/Wolf/Barr ongoing White Nationalist immigration charade.
Due Process Forever!
PWS
07-24-20