The most damning inside portrait of the Trump administration yet
It is a testament to the turbulence of this presidential administration that there seems to be a new bombshell tell-all announced every month. Yet for attempts by the White House to suppress and discredit Michael Wolff's Fire & Fury, Bob Woodward's Fear: Trump in the White House, Mary Trump's Too Much and Never Enough, or John Bolton's The Room Where It Happened, there have been few revelations that have done more than merely corroborate that the White House staff is dysfunctional, and the president thin-skinned and erratic.
Netflix's Immigration Nation is the rare look at the administration that the White House is actually right to be terrified of. The six-part documentary series, out Monday, began back in 2017 with the cooperation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); the idea was for filmmakers Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz to document the way the agency evolved under President Trump. Three years on, the administration has since attempted to censor the documentary, or at least block its release until after the November election. They're smart to have tried: Immigration Nation is a bombshell that actually lands, not just because it contains more than idle gossip, but because it devastatingly undermines Trump's tough-on-immigration message by showing the inhumanity and unconscionable cruelty of his agency's tactics.
When Trump descended down his golden escalator to announce that he was running for president back in 2015, he opened with a famously vitriolic and racist speech: "[Mexico is] sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems," he said. "They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists and some, I assume, are good people." The language stoked Trump's base, but relied on stereotypes of Latin America that aren't based in truth; today, the "vast majority" of people in ICE custody have no prior criminal record, federal numbers published by Syracuse University show. Only one out of five detainees has committed what ICE classifies as a felony, although the agency's definition is broad and includes crimes like "selling marijuana," which is decriminalized or legalized in many states. Still, under Trump, ICE has been empowered not only to sweep up "collaterals" — random law-abiding and often tax-paying undocumented immigrants they stumble on while searching for their target — but have also adopted a dangerous and unsuccessful policy of "deterrence," with the objective of making life so horrific for immigrants, including their young children, that word supposedly travels back to where they're from and stops more migrants from coming. "The administration has changed, and we are finally able to do our job," brags one agent in the doc.
Part of what makes Immigration Nation so eye-popping is, quite simply, the stupidity — or perhaps arrogance — with which the ICE agents speak and act in front of rolling cameras. It is sickening to watch agents gleefully celebrate breaking apart families with their arrests, or mocking their detainees as the fathers, mothers, children, and grandparents sob in holding pens. Other footage is even more incriminating: agents lie to immigrants in order to gain entry into their homes and arrest them, and at one point, an officer even illegally picks a lock with a knife to enter a building during a raid. Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesman, ghoulishly discusses ramping up ICE arrests as retaliation against a county that votes out a sheriff who was more friendly to the agency, and admits to inflating the number of criminal arrests. Many of the interviewed agents complain about being compared to Nazis, but turn around and justify their actions by saying "I'm just doing my job." One of the most alarming moments comes when the filmmakers are riding along with an agent who has previously expressed his uneasiness about arresting collaterals; the agent's boss calls him and on speaker phone, knowing full well cameras are present, insists "I don't care what you do, but bring at least two people in."
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