'It can be hard to keep hope': behind a shocking immigration docuseries

It’s not uncommon for film-makers to end up locked in prolonged squabbles with producers or studios once a production has advanced to the editing suite, wrestling for control over tone and content. Somewhat less common is the predicament that befell Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau, in which the two documentarians had to face off against a department of the US government in order to secure final cut privileges.

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Their new docuseries, Immigration Nation, comes to Netflix this week, in spite of the best efforts from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency. Across six hour-long episodes, the sprawling project unpacks this hot-button issue with a Dickensian scope, showing how decisions made by state and federal politicians send out shockwaves affecting law enforcement officials, lawyers, immigrants, their families and many others caught up in this thorny system. An unprecedented level of officially sanctioned access allowed Schwarz and Clusiau to gather edifying and often shocking footage of operations under the zealous Trump administration, but as detailed in a New York Times feature last week, relations broke down once the head of public relations at Ice got a look at the finished product.

Schwarz and Clusiau begin their joint interview with the Guardian by issuing a cautious caveat: “There may be some questions that, legally, we just can’t answer for you.” That doesn’t stop them from speaking candidly about the surreal, unsettling experience of finding one’s self in the crosshairs of a vast and powerful establishment. “We were treated in a bullying way – in our opinion – for months,” Schwarz says. “That’s something Ice has in its DNA. That’s how they treat immigrants, and we’re privileged to have a legal team supporting us, but we did see some frightening parallels. You’re intimidated until you give up, or take whatever you can get.”

The pair familiarized themselves with the topic through some nonfiction work about the Department of Homeland Security and Ice’s presence along the US-Mexico border during the Obama administration. They floated the idea that would become Immigration Nation to a spokesman with whom “a trust had been built”, but lack of interest from an Obama-run DHS stalled development. Upon the election of Donald Trump, a candidate campaigning on aggressive anti-immigrant sentiments, the pair traveled to DC to check back in with the spokesman and pitch an update of the concept adjusted to the drastic new moment. “I told him, ‘Look, this will be a heated debate, it’s a signature issue of Trump’s platform, and Ice is going to be propelled into a new place of judgment for the public,’” Schwarz says. “We wanted to tell the story from that side, and that’s how we pitched the idea. In a couple of months, we were filming.”

“The vision was always ‘we don’t want to be Cops,’” Clusiau adds. “That was clear from the start. The vision was to tell this story from the inside out, with us coming from within the system in a way unique among documentaries. To that extent, I think the show is really similar to our initial pitch. What changed, what we couldn’t anticipate, were the shifts in policy and how heated this would become. We didn’t know that there would be zero-tolerance, child separation, changes in asylum law and on and on.”

Anyone with an ear to the news knows that as detention camps have multiplied and accounts of their mismanagement have leaked, immigration policy has grown more contentious under Trump. But by focusing on a granular human element beyond the headlines and statistics, the series brings a new gravity to an old conversation. We watch as César, an undocumented veteran, pleads with a governor for a pardon on his deportation order. We see father Josue weeping in a holding cell, wondering when he’ll be able to hold his child again, if ever. We encounter a man wandering through the Arizona desert, dying of thirst for a chance at a new life. With no talking-head commentary, no voiceover and no supplemental sources, these scenes speak for themselves.

“To me, the most surprising thing was how individuals get chewed up by the system,” Clusiau says. “The bureaucracy and the paperwork, everything required to adjust your status and go to court and complete these applications – it involves so many processes that it almost seems like a deterrent.”

Schwarz continues: “Even when you’re trying to be professional, of course you take home some sadness and anger, particularly when you see injustice and how arbitrary it can be … I guess I had this notion that yes, the system’s unjust and things will shift in this administration, but I’m an immigrant to this country. [Schwarz was born in Israel.] Generally, I have a constant belief that common sense tends to prevail in America. Seeing the immigration system, I realized that it so thoroughly doesn’t. That’s not a political thing to say. It is broken, and it destroys lives, and it doesn’t make sense. We remained in shocked awe at how bad it is for a long part of production. It’s broken, though that feeling of brokenness is by design. It can be hard to keep hope. The series has its small victories, but it’s dark, and the reality beyond the screen is even grimmer.”

In the months since finalizing the fully unexpurgated cut now on Netflix, however, the directors have received a couple of reasons to keep their chins up. César got that pardon, though he won’t be out of the woods until he can adjust his immigrant status and be cleared of his technical fugitive classification. In the sanctuary city of Charlotte, where city police take a stand against Ice in the third episode, legislation intended to force compliance from local sheriffs through hefty punitive fines was shot down. The first episode ends with a title card explaining that its subject Scott, a deputy field officer director for Ice in New York, retired in 2018 after his time on camera. That came from the top down.

“His resignation had nothing to do with the show,” Schwarz explains. “He retired. That’s a legal thing that Ice has asked us to write. If they had fired him, I can see why they’d want to point that out. That wasn’t the case, but Ice asked for a legal correction, and it boggles my mind why they wanted to say that, to be honest.”

To hazard a guess, based on the other tweaks government officials tried to force on Schwarz and Clusiau: they wanted to shift the narrative. The New York Times piece enumerates a handful of contested scenes, all of which cast Ice agents in a less than flattering light. The agency sent sternly worded messages requesting the directors remove, among others, one segment in which Ice agents lie to convince residents to allow the squad entry to a building. The film-makers held their ground and retorted that Ice’s rationale (that this scene depicted the confidential use of fingerprint scanners in field work) was based on a faulty defense (the scanner had long been visible on Ice’s official website).

“Of course it was intimidating,” Schwarz says. “We didn’t want to be there. But it also kind of gives you the rage needed to say, ‘That’s not the contract.’ There were first amendment rights written clearly into it. When someone does give you access, if there was a debate over something not looking right or something being unfair, we’d have come to listen. That’s not how we were treated.”

Schwarz and Clusiau were blindsided by the sudden enmity in part because they had worked to uphold an ideal of both-sides objectivity. “We’re not activists, we’re journalists,” Schwarz firmly states. “We have to ask every question, use anger and frustration as a tool when appropriate, but you also have to flip the point of view. It’s our job to poke at different things, allowing you to choose. Everyone has an angle, and we can be accused of assuming this or that angle, but we really show all sides.”

“I always felt like I could find some common ground,” Clusiau says. “No matter what I disagreed on with an officer’s politics or how they did their job, you could always find a common ground with them, as a person. I can’t say that I was ever shocked. In this political climate, a lot of these officers are put in a tough position, and a lot of them come from a long line of career officials. I think many of them grapple with the morality of what they’re doing, whether they agree with the policies or not.”

Even in their criticisms, the directors had always challenged themselves to locate a point of compassion with the widely loathed officers. When Ice accused them of thumbing the scale to stoke antipathy, their day-one refusal to portray any of their subjects broadly provided the most effective safeguard. “Some of them love it, some of them act like bullies as a result of this administration’s bullying,” Schwarz says. “We show that. But not all of them. Maybe people will get angry, but just like there are good cops, there are good Ice officers doing things that are needed. They’ve been put in a hard position. In this age of police accountability, we should hold them accountable, but just as important is holding the system accountable. Sometimes, that’s more important, seeing that bigger picture.

“We like to take complicated issues that people are not comfortable talking about and use that discomfort to create a debate,” he says. “That’s needed in the America of today.”

• Immigration Nation is now available on Netflix