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The Star-Spangled Banner, the United States of America national anthem, has a first stanza that ends with the home of the brave. The bravest people I have come across through a screen are undocumented illegals, Marco Saavedra, Viridiana Martinez, and Mohammad Abdollahi. Each of these individuals is an undocumented immigrant in the US who risks deportation by helping families in immigration detention facilities.
A group called the National Immigrant Youth Alliance was operating out of a safe house in Florida, powered by cells and laptops, and had been waiting for the Broward Transitional Center to get its hands on a prison-like space that housed generally 600 men and 100 women that were never formally charged with anything. Those people are waiting for a chance to live a productive life in this rich country but will likely be deported instead without ever having a strong advocate on their side.
Marco was the first to barge in, so to speak, and knock on the so-called prison’s door while pretending to search for his cousin. He is now left, like everyone else, to languish after being detained, fingerprinted, and shackled. He gets in touch with Claudio Rojas (whose son had been in contact with NIYA) and they start joint efforts to distribute the group’s hotline, mobilize email campaigns, and create enough of a stir to have people who do not pose any public risk set free.
Directors Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra chose to focus on this story with an interesting blend of classic cinematography and minute-by-minute documentary making. The Infiltrators may not be as fascinating as more recent hybrids like The Invisibles or Who Will Write Our History?, but the narrative haze certainly makes it a far more interesting film experiment. The story is composed of actors reenacting the lives of real people, real documentary footage of the people, and what seems like re-enactments of actual real life events. The mix works very well. The film also had some creative use of prison cliches, such as the infamous stolen razor, which you expect to be used as a weapon, but ends up being more useful for putting out phone numbers instead.
Additionally, this operates as effective propaganda. Individual stories are at the heart of the film. A Congolese woman who gets beaten by her husband expects help from law enforcement. She is serving a sentence in prison for three years. Another woman is politically exiled from Venezuela and frightened to go back. (During the nights she sheds tears when she thinks about her dog.) This man lives in Florida with his four children and an American wife. He had two brothers back in Honduras who were murdered by gangs.
It certainly made me furious, just like the intention of the filmmakers of The Infiltrators. People like me are descended from immigrants escaping from Nazi Europe, antisemitic Holocaust survivors, as well as deeply hearing their voices exclaiming, this isn’t how it should be. What the filmmakers of this documentary attempted, they achieved successfully. And I felt a sense of guilt for not acting more like “Radam,” the white privilege ally who sneaks freedom papers into the hands of illegal immigrants.
That’s what makes the whole situation so aggravating! He isn’t trafficking weapons or narcotics. No. He is smuggling dull legal documents that require signatures, and that is the only way government officials will even acknowledge that there are people who are being detained and would like to apply for asylum. This system is so broken that the grand theft scene is devoted to a crime that is completely legal.
You can look at it this way, the final joke of the film Infiltrators is that this was done in 2012. The movie ends at Trump’s America where the self-created crisis of immigrant caravans is even more lunatic than it was before. If anything good comes from it, more people know about this issue thanks to the main characters of this film.
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