A film about immigration raids in the United States was shown at the Venice Film Festival.
Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras said on September 7 that she hopes a new documentary about immigration raids in the United States will help show how abnormal the violence and brutality that has accompanied President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign is, writes Poitras. Reuters.
The 25-minute film "They Are Here," co-directed by Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller and premiered at the Venice Film Festival, follows volunteers in Minneapolis who tracked the movements of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducting deportation operations earlier this year.
"The reality is a nightmare. The entire country is under attack, and immigrants across the United States are now living in fear," Poitras said before the screening.
On the subject: Memphis residents are delivering food and medicine to migrants afraid to leave their homes because of ICE raids.
Trump launched a massive deportation campaign immediately after taking office in January 2025. He has repeatedly defended ICE's practices and insisted that people who entered the country illegally should be sent back.
The Minneapolis operation sparked weeks of protests and clashes between demonstrators and immigration officers, during which immigration agents shot and killed two US citizens.
"In the mainstream media, such violence is beginning to be perceived as normal. We firmly believe in the power of cinema to restore a sense of the abnormality of what's happening and show what's happening in reality," the director noted at a press conference.
Poitras, whose feature-length film "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, said she and Müller decided to make a short film because they felt it was important to tell the story as quickly as possible.
Shot primarily from the perspective of local residents tracking the movements of ICE teams, the film intersperses scenes of volunteer dispatch networks with the story of a Mexican man hiding from immigration authorities with the help of his son.
Footage shows residents routing unmarked ICE vehicles, masked agents confronting protesters on snowy streets, and handcuffed detainees being placed on deportation flights.
The Minneapolis operation became a sore point in the deportation campaign, and the US administration eventually scaled it back after months of unrest.
Müller said they wanted to document not only the scale of the anti-immigration operation, but also how the city community responded to it.
"The resistance was primarily about documenting what was happening, because the goal wasn't to confront ICE, but to protect people," she explained. "These are our neighbors, and we don't want them taken away from us."
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She said the subsequent reduction in the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers showed that the community's efforts had worked.
"ICE removed 80% of its agents. This was a genuine response to public resistance, and I think this gives reason for hope," she concluded.
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ICE is detaining more than 800 migrants with no criminal history daily, a record high.
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