The connections that finally opened the door to the documentary project were made in 2011, when Mr. Schwarz, an Israeli journalist who first came to the United States as a foreign correspondent and later became a naturalized citizen, integrated into a local bureau of ICE in Arizona for a project on drug cartels. It was never published, but Mr. Schwarz became friends with the public information officer who coordinated the embedding.
During the following years, the officer rose through the agency until he was promoted to oversee the press office at his Washington headquarters. Sometimes, while Barack Obama was still president, Schwarz raised the idea of making a story about the agency’s immigration work, but got nowhere.
Shortly after Trump took office in 2017, Schwarz and Clusiau, a former photo editor for Time magazine who grew up in Minnesota, traveled to Washington and asked the official for lunch, presenting the idea for a documentary series examining how the agency would evolve as Trump followed through on his promise to crack down on immigration. The lunch led to a meeting where the filmmakers convinced high-ranking officials to sign the project.
The filmmakers’ attorney, Victoria S. Cook, negotiated a contract with strong protections for her journalistic independence. It allowed ICE to review drafts of the series before it was published. But the agency was allowed to request changes only based on factual inaccuracies, violations of privacy rights, or the inclusion of law enforcement tactics that could hinder officers’ ability to do their job or put them in harm’s way. Matthew T. Albence, the current acting director of ICE, signed on behalf of the government.
Over the next two and a half years, the couple filmed a look at the federal immigration control system, uncovering many inherent contradictions.
They followed Border Patrol tactical officers who prided themselves on rescuing migrants from deadly dehydration, even as officers acknowledged that their tactics were pushing migrants further into danger. They showed how the government had sometimes assessed the success of its border policies based not only on the number of detained migrants, but also on the number of people who died while crossing.
They followed refugees who fled their countries of origin because their lives were in danger, who had been examined for several years before their number was called for resettlement in the United States. The filmmakers showed that after Mr. Trump was elected, many of those refugees with pre-approved cases were placed in an indefinite administrative limbo to fulfill the promises the President had made to cut refugee resettlement numbers.
