Netflix’s Immigration Nation, which debuted August 3, was made by documentary filmmakers Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz, who pitched their idea directly to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson—and spent nearly three years traveling around the country, filming ICE’s operations under the Trump administration. “We worked in small teams because we wanted the intimacy, to be able to really dive into people’s lives,” Clusiau explained of the harrowing series, which also follows several immigrants trapped in limbo somewhere in the U.S. immigration process.
ICE is just one of several agencies that manage immigration in America, all under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. But with unprecedented access into the inner workings of ICE, Clusiau and Schwarz’s production illuminates how Donald Trump’s rhetoric around immigration has been translated into the on-the-ground pursuit, arrest, detention, and deportation of undocumented migrants. When ICE spokespeople first saw rough cuts of the show, they reacted badly—to the point of trying to delay the docuseries until after the 2020 election.
Thanks to a stiff contract, Clusiau and Schwarz prevailed, and the series is now available on Netflix. Vanity Fair sat down with the filmmakers to talk about the challenges of making Immigration Nation, how their relationship with ICE deteriorated, and what they learned during filming about the workings of the vast immigration system under the Trump administration. “It’s not a mistake,” Schwarz said of the bureaucracy’s failings. “It’s by design.”
Vanity Fair: The administration’s immigration policies are changing all the time. You cover a lot of new restrictions for asylum-seekers in Immigration Nation, and just a few days ago, the Trump administration released even newer procedures. How did you stay abreast of the shifting landscape during production?
Christina Clusiau: Yeah, we thought a lot about that through the process. What are the policies that are going to remain in effect, or are going to keep changing as time goes on? That was important to recognize, because we did cast such a wide net. Changing the policies was something that was really important to paint this bigger picture, not just about the individual decisions on the ground, but the systematic change and how it’s very unfavorable to many.
It’s amazing, the bureaucratic issues, like [the budget shortfall at] USCIS, [which has further delayed application processing]. We never had any access within those systems, but you did see how, for example, the refugees are putting these documents in these administrative black holes. That was something really surprising to see, how much all these agencies [work] together for this bigger picture of holding paperwork, keeping people detained, backlogging the court systems. All of this was just part of the bigger system.
Shaul Schwarz: It was a very difficult production in many ways, and [navigating the changes] was one of them. We wanted, obviously, to use the more unique access we had, which was being able to kind of walk around inside ICE, and find immigrant characters from within the system. And once we found those stories that we thought were very real and very strong, or the ICE agents that were truly letting us document their day-in-the-life, then we stuck with them, and we tried to anchor that in policy that really represented this bigger theme. But of course it was slightly impossible, especially on a work that lasted almost three years.
How else was it a difficult production?
Schwarz: So many ways.
Clusiau: Because things are changing so quickly, we didn’t have much notice. You had to be very nimble and quick to jump, to be willing to—you know, tomorrow morning, get on a flight to go to El Paso because Berta [an El Salvadorean grandmother seeking asylum, featured in the docuseries] is going to be deported. ICE is doing an operation in North Carolina; it starts tomorrow at 5 a.m. Can you guys get there? A lot of that was quite tricky.