The Infiltrators by Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera (review)

Having been described as a “docufiction” and “docu-thriller” on last year’s film festival circuit, and even as a riff on the heist film genre by the filmmakers themselves, The Infiltrators is an eclectic mix of cinematic forms that bucks conventional description within established varieties of documentary. The film follows a group of DREAMer activists and members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) who in 2012 purposely surrendered themselves to Customs and Border Patrol in order to gain access to the Broward County Detention Facility in South Florida. Their original goal was to “infiltrate” the facility in order to contact Claudio Rojas, an undocumented individual from Argentina who was suddenly detained and threatened with deportation, and try to secure his release. Once inside, however, they soon discover that their advocacy and connections to the outside world could help countless more detained within Broward.

The film’s main action—dealing with armed guards, smuggling things in and out of what is essentially a prison, stopping government planes on the tarmac— is the stuff of blockbuster movies, and, visually, directors Rivera and Ibarra use a few scripted, big-budget tropes to emphasize the danger and drama of the whole infiltration endeavor, such as opening the film with shots of the US-Mexico border as seen from a high-tech night-vision camera and scripting a smuggling scene that’s as nailbiting as anything in a Hollywood production. But The Infiltrators is not so much a thriller or heist film as a kind of ghost story. Millions haunt this film—particularly the nearly 1.3 million Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling on whether or not the Trump administration can end the program and the estimated 10.7 million undocumented individuals who live with a constant fear of arrest, confinement, and deportation.

It is the relationship and solidarity between these groups that the film’s genre-bending tries so valiantly to represent. The titular “infiltrators,” Marco Saavedra and Viridiana Martinez, represent the former and the particular relationship DREAMers have to media representation and to the law leading up to the implementation of the DACA program. The film makes it clear that the thought of surrendering to immigration officials is only made possible by the limited protections from deportation Saavedra and Martinez achieved due to the media coverage of their activism with NIYA. For Saavedra and Martinez, it is the paradox of being able to live and advocate for themselves and others because they are openly undocumented that necessitates an action like gaining access to a detention center.

Once inside Broward, Saavedra and Martinez’s experiences are implicitly compared to those of other non-DREAMer detainees, including the aforementioned Claudio Rojas, arrested and detained without warning; Maria Soledad, a Venezuelan political asylum seeker; Neema Mukun, a Congolese woman whose attempt to flee an abusive husband lands her in detention for three years; and Ashan, a Sri Lankan migrant detained for more than two years. These individual stories give us glimpses into the scope of the Obama-era deportation apparatus, but Rivera and Ibarra also use them to demonstrate the complex relationship detained migrants have to both legal and media representation. In transporting us to the heart of a detention center, Rivera and Ibarra show us how these spaces are designed to function as representational “black boxes.” With the media and general public denied access to these privately run centers, and with migrants often being moved between them with no notice given to their families or loved ones, detained migrants are depicted as living specters with few ways to communicate with the greater public and government officials on the outside. For NIYA and the directors, the terrible irony of all this is that they are trapped in a system that denies them basic legal rights yet invokes classical liberalism’s “right to privacy” as a means of blocking access to anyone with interest. Saavedra describes this liminal position best: “You see, because none of...