It was eight years ago, well before Donald Trump: two young undocumented migrants were deliberately arrested by the American border police, in order to infiltrate a private detention center in Florida and observe " domestic ”US migration policy.
Read also: With his portraits of migrants, George W. Bush sends a message to Donald Trump and the Republicans
The result is a punchy documentary,
The Infiltrators
, released on the US public channel PBS a few weeks before the US presidential election on November 3 in which Donald Trump, who has made hardening migration a leitmotif, hopes to be re-elected.
"
What freedom, what power, what dignity to grant to migrants from this country?"
This is one of the central questions of the film, and a central question of this election,
”American-Peruvian director Alex Rivera told AFP, co-director of the film with his wife Cristina Ibarra, American of origin. Mexican.
"
The question of the rights of undocumented migrants has never been so burning
", underlines Alex Rivera, who describes his film as the story of a "
heist
", an "Ocean's 11
of immigration
".
Obama also indicted
Former President Barack Obama was nicknamed "
the chief expeller
" because of the 3.2 million migrants expelled from the United States during his tenure between 2009 and 2016. This policy was "
a big mistake
" , now says Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who was his vice-president throughout this period.
Even the highest Trump administration eviction figures (some 337,000 evictions in 2018) remain below the Obama years (over 400,000 annually for the period 2012 to 2014), according to the Pew Research Institute.
Read also: Mexican border: where is Trump's wall?
Although he has made undocumented migrants one of his scapegoats, Donald Trump has not fully kept his promise to complete the construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border, nor to deport three million undocumented migrants - he expelled less than half of them.
But the powers of the migration police were considerably strengthened under his mandate, and their methods - including dramatic scenes of separation of children from their parents, or arrests in courts, where migration agents were forbidden to go. before - have continued to fuel the controversy since 2017.
Read also: United States: court orders release of migrant children due to coronavirus
Alternating between documentary scenes and reenactments of what they experienced in the Broward, Florida detention center,
The Infiltrators
- visible until November 5 on the PBS site pov.org - tells the story of two members of the the National Alliance of Young Migrants, a militant group of “Dreamers”: these young children who arrived in the United States who, although Americanized since having spent most of their lives in the United States, remain on probation for lack of a permit of sustainable stay.
“
Since 2012, we have seen injustices against migrants.
But now the conditions in the detention centers are much worse because of the pandemic
", told AFP one of these" infiltrators ", Marco Saavedra, 30, employee in a Mexican restaurant of his family in the Bronx, pending the processing of his request for political asylum.
Read also: United States: Trump's about-face on the visa of foreign students
Another protagonist of the film, the Argentinian Claudio Rojas, whom the "infiltrators" managed to get out of the detention center: he was arrested after the film was presented at the Sundance festival in 2019, and expelled a week before the documentary's release in Florida.
“
It was horrible.
It was as if we were reliving the film, but with us inside,
”says Cristina Ibarra.
Another recent release:
Immigration Nation
, a six-part series on Netflix, offers a rare dive into the functioning of the migration police.
American filmmakers Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz have obtained the unprecedented authorization to follow, for two and a half years, agents of ICE (the American immigration control body) in their operations against undocumented migrants.
Read also: The United States expels migrants in defiance of all health rules
They told the
New York Times that
ICE asked them to postpone the broadcast after the election, and cut out some key scenes, such as when officers lie so they can enter the homes of undocumented migrants, or are ordered to also arrest "collaterals" - undocumented migrants who are not subject to any arrest warrant.
But the broadcast was able to be maintained thanks to the precautions taken in the signed contract, the pre-filming, between ICE and the directors, they indicated. These films come in addition to other documentaries on illegal immigration released in recent years, such as
Living Undocumented
(
Living Undocumented
, on Netflix) or
Torn Apart: Separated at the border
(
Torn apart at the border
, on HBO) .
