Getting Detained by ICE—on Purpose

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

In 2012, two young activists from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance went on an undercover mission to infiltrate the Broward Transitional Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Florida. NIYA had been contacted by the son of a man named Claudio Rojas, who was taken from his home by immigration agents and brought to Broward. NIYA has been compared to ACT UP; its members try to force confrontations with authorities over immigration policy. The two activists, who are themselves undocumented, pretended to be newly arrived, confused immigrants who spoke little English. They got themselves arrested by somewhat perplexed Border Patrol agents. The story of those activists is told in a new film called “The Infiltrators,” which recently showed at the Sundance Festival and South by Southwest. It is a kind of quasi-documentary, the directors Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera tell David Remnick; because they were not able to film inside the ICE facility, they staged a reënactment of the events inside a decommissioned mental hospital. Rojas, who had been released from detention after staging a hunger strike, advised the production for verisimilitude. But after the movie’s release, Rojas was suddenly re-detained during a routine check-in with ICE, which he attended with his lawyer. “For eight years I presented myself for supervision visits,” Rojas tells The New Yorker’s Camila Osorio, speaking on the phone from detention. “Why didn’t they detain me before? . . . I am completely sure that this is a reprisal against me, that they want to deport me no matter what.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.7	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In 2012, a man named Claudio Rojas was taken from his home in Florida by immigration and customs enforcement, ICE. Now, that was hardly unusual. He was one of
0:23.6	more than 400,000 people detained that year. But what happened next was out of the ordinary, to say the
0:30.0	least. Rojas's son contacted the National Immigrant Youth Alliance for help with his father's case.
0:37.3	And two young activists with that group
0:39.2	went on an undercover mission to infiltrate the Broward Transitional Center where Rojas was being
0:45.3	held. They pretended to be newly arrived undocumented immigrants barely speaking English, and they got
0:51.4	themselves arrested by ICE deliberately. They wanted to find out
0:55.5	exactly what was going on at the center and reported out to the world, and Rojas himself was
1:01.7	eventually released from detention after leading a hunger strike there. Their story, those activists
1:07.6	and Claudio Rojas, is told in a new film called The Infiltrators.
1:12.8	Now, it's not exactly a documentary, it's a kind of quasi-documentary, and we'll explain that in a second.
1:18.7	It showed recently at the Sundance Film Festival and in Austin at South by Southwest.
1:24.3	I talked with the directors Christina Ibarra and Alex Rivera early in the morning after their
1:28.8	screening in Austin last week. So Alex, the two activists are named Viridiana Martinez and
1:36.5	Marcos Avedra. These are in a sense the two heroes in this film. These are the people that
1:43.1	are activists and infiltrate
1:45.7	these detention centers who are they sure so marco and viti are both folks that commonly
1:52.1	might be referred to as dreamers meaning there were brought to this country at a very young age
1:56.6	they were both brought from mexico um marco from southern me, from Oaxaca, and Vidi from northern
2:02.7	Mexico, from Monterey.
2:05.5	And they both ended up, their families ended up finding opportunity and staying in this country.
	...

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