Immigration Nation Lets ICE Agents Tell Their Side of the Story. They're Still the Villains.

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/culture/2020/07/ice-docuseries-immigration-nation-netflix-review.html

ICE officials are having second thoughts. No, not about indiscriminately rounding up undocumented people or about separating children from their parents at the border, but about giving two documentary filmmakers permission to film their operation and how it evolved following Trump’s election. During his campaign, Trump promised his supporters that he would crack down on undocumented migrants living in the United States. The second he had the opportunity to do so, he followed through. Immigration Nation, a six-part docuseries set to release Aug. 3 on Netflix, shows the tactics used to enforce the president’s policies. The filmmakers say Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials pushed to have entire scenes deleted or at least to delay the release until after the presidential election. Their efforts may have done the series a favor by turning it into forbidden fruit.

But the excitement of watching something the government doesn’t want anyone to see took two minutes, in my case, to turn into rage. The first episode begins outside a building in New York City at dawn. A group of ICE agents is banging on the door of someone’s apartment. When a woman asks them to identify themselves, they refuse to say.: “We’re not going to yell out in a hallway through a closed door. That’s not how we do business.” We know what happens if she opens that door, but she has no way of knowing that they’re immigration police there to arrest her father. She asks for a warrant. An agent offers her a business card. “Plus, you opened the door and let me in,” he says, callously suggesting it’s her own fault.

That scene hit too close for comfort. After 9/11, Homeland Security carried out a series of raids on the homes of Muslim Americans. They tricked my mother into opening the door, just after 4 a.m., to search our apartment. Remembering that trauma, wishing they too were caught on camera, I realized this would be a difficult watch. It didn’t let up. One scene shows an ICE agent illegally breaking into an apartment building, picking a lock with his pocketknife. Another shows an ICE deputy field office director, identified as Mike, mocking someone they had detained and filming him with his iPhone. Bryan Cox, who works with ICE Public Affairs, is caught on camera intentionally misleading the media. At a press conference, he says that 91 percent of their arrests last year were criminal. Behind closed doors, he and his colleagues acknowledge that the current stats, showing 35 percent of arrests are criminal, disproving what he just said. “Yes. Just own it,” he tells them privately.

*snip*

[soothsayer]

1. Oh this is that Netflix thing drumpf was trying to block

Yeah they sure made it must-watch tv!