ASU students and downtown community members came to the Downtown Phoenix campus Friday evening for a free film screening of “The Infiltrators” and a post-film discussion with the directors.
The film tells the story of a few undocumented youth leaders from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance who purposefully are detained by Border Patrol to get into a Florida detention center to stop deportations.
The event was a collaboration between Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, the School of Film, Dance and Theatre, and Barrett, the Honors College. It was also a part of CSRD’s Created Equal Film and Arts Series.
The moderator for the discussion, Dr. Mathew Sandoval, professor at Barrett and faculty fellow for CSRD, said that this film was brought to the attention of the center from faculty at the Herberger Institute. After they viewed the film at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of this year, they started talking to the directors about bringing it to Arizona.
“It made obvious sense that we would want to have it here at ASU since our community is very much facing this exact same issue,” Dr. Sandoval said. “The families, people, and our own student body are very much a part of the crisis that this film is exploring. We felt a kind of political and moral obligation to bring this film to ASU as a way to put it in our community.”
Having it shown downtown also allowed it to be more widely accessible to the community at large.
“Because the center is located downtown and so much of the work that we do is located in Phoenix, we wanted to do a screening here at the downtown campus to make it available for our broader Phoenix community who tend to come out to these things,” Dr. Sandoval said.
The Infiltrators is a hybrid of real footage and dramatized reenactments that took seven years to complete.
The story starts off with Claudio Rojas, an undocumented immigrant who was arrested by ICE in 2012 outside of his home and taken to the Broward Transitional Center, a for-profit detention center in Florida.
It was a call to the National Immigrant Youth Alliance by Rojas’ son that initiated the infiltration movement. He wanted to stop his dad’s deportation, and the organization knew exactly how to do that.
By purposefully getting themselves arrested by Border Patrol and put into Broward, Marco Saavedra and Viridiana Martinez were able to organize from within.
Their job was to gather names of detainees and numbers of their family members to send out to the NIYA on the outside.
They would do this by sending in a documented member of the organization into the center as a visitor, who would then hand off privacy release forms to Saavedra. Once Saavedra had as many detainees as possible sign off on them, Saavedra would hand them back to the member during the next visiting session.
The forms themselves gave the organization permission to use the detainee’s information to create publicized petitions for them to be released on discretion, which basically allows ICE to choose which cases of deportation they can hold off on pursuing.
By the end, both Saavedra and Martinez were released, as the detention center was well aware of what they were doing and wanted to stop them.
Once on the outside, they were able to rejoin their organization to create a stronger campaign for Rojas, who would eventually be released on discretion with annual check-ins with ICE.
This past February, Rojas was detained by ICE and deported back to Argentina; however, the organization is continuing to fight for him.
During the post-film discussion, directors Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra said that from the beginning of their film-making careers, they knew wanted to focus on the border and immigration issues.
Rivera explains how in 2010 he began seeing how undocumented youth were risking deportation as an act of political protest by doing sit-ins, road blocking, and even hunger strikes.
This was around the time that they were fighting for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and pushing against the Obama Administration to act on their power to pass the Dream Act.
Once witnessing these actions that he says he had never seen before, he reached out to the National Immigrant Youth Alliance to learn more about their efforts.
Though the organization was working on a number of different things during the time, Rivera explained why they specifically decided on the organization’s infiltration movement to be the subject of their film.
“It seemed incredibly dramatic and like a story worth telling,” Rivera said. “We filmed on and off for about two years, and after that was done, we looked back at the footage and identified this particular action as one that had a great beginning, middle, and end. One that if you looked at it, you could see a lot of big concerns and themes.
John Paul Rabusa, student at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, said that this film taught him a lot more about the act of infiltration and about the global impact youth-led organizations can have.
“It was very interesting to see how much impact people of our age could make,” Rabusa said. “Being able to see such creative students and such creative youth leaders be able to do that type of thing is really inspiring.”
Eric Zhao, student at the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, shared that although he could not directly relate to the topic of the film, he was able to evaluate and compare his way of life to those portrayed in the film.
“It was definitely emotionally impactful for me,” Zhao said. “It really kind of put my whole life into a whole different perspective. I grew up without having to worry that I could go to college or that I could get a job without any problem. Some of these people just can’t do that.”
Other students related strongly to the film but still felt they learned plenty about what goes on in the detention centers.
“Being Latina, it definitely just kind of hit me hard,” said Chelsea Martinez, student at the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. “It definitely made me more aware of the circumstances immigrant people are going through, and I didn’t know there were organizations that took it so far to actually help others get out of these centers.”
Contact the reporter at adiazvic@asu.edu.
