Latest / National Immigration Law Center Freedom to Thrive Podcast / Ep. #111 Borderland I The Line Within

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Ep. #111 Borderland I The Line Within · National Immigration Law Center Freedom to Thrive Podcast

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For the past few years, we've heard a lot of talk about the border,
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in the news and in political discourse.
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For most of us, when we hear about the border, we probably think of the southwestern
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U.S., Texas, Arizona, and California.
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But what if I told you the border was everywhere? In your neighborhood in the
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Midwest, in your community in the Pacific Northwest, in your backyard along
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the East Coast? You might be doubtful, maybe even confused, rightfully so.
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Well, a powerful new documentary called Borderlands, The Line Within,
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has opened my eyes to a dark reality that we don't often hear about.
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And that is the vast reach and scale of the very lucrative and highly militarized
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border industrial complex, which has a presence everywhere in our country in
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unsuspecting places and ways.
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The film also weaves in the stories of individuals as they experience our country's
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dysfunctional immigration system.
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Their experiences are harrowing and heartbreaking, but also courageous,
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triumphant, and powerful.
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This film is timely, it is urgent, and it's incredibly well done.
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Today I'm talking with three of the people involved in bringing Borderland,
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The Line Within, to the screen.
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We're shaking things up a little today as we've never had three guests on the
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podcast before, but I'm excited to welcome Pamela Yates, the film's award-winning director.
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Paco Leonis, the film's producer, and Alex Gil, one of three data humanists
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in the documentary who helped bring to life the stunning data we're going to be talking about.
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You do not want to miss this conversation. This is the NILC Freedom to Thrive
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Podcast, powering pro-immigrant narratives, one story at a time.
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I'm Victoria Ballesteros, Executive Vice President of Narrative at the National
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Immigration Law Center.
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Hi, Pamela. Hi, Paco. Hi, Alex. Welcome and thank you for joining us.
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Congratulations on your film. When I watched Borderland, The Line Within,
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I literally felt every single emotion there is.
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You have raised a critically important conversation with this film that is missing
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from the larger immigration dialogue. How did this film come together?
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Well, it really came together because of our concern about the cruel and inhumane
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immigration policies that had stretched back a long way, but became particularly
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acute during the first Trump administration.
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And Paco and I have a long history of working in Latin America,
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but we really felt it was time to have a critique of our own country and to
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tell a story of our own country, but somehow connected to Latin America.
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And that's when we started to look at what could we contribute?
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What story could we add to the conversation, the national debate around immigration
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that we felt that would be true to the values?
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We consider ourselves to be filmmakers who are human rights defenders.
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We're artists and we're also activists.
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And how do we bring those two things together. Well, just like a lawyer who
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uses law to be a human rights defender, we use cinema,
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the art and beauty and power of cinematic storytelling to be human rights defenders.
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It certainly comes across in the film. And there are two tracks sort of in the
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film, as I saw it, that are woven together very beautifully and effectively.
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And one follows the journeys and experiences of a couple of people,
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Gaviela and Kaj, as they go through and experience our immigration system.
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So that's sort of one track. The other track follows the money and the data
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behind the border industrial complex.
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And I want to talk about both things. Can we really quickly for folks who may not know what that is.
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What is the term border industrial complex mean? What is that?
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The border industrial complex is the amount of money in the federal budget,
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which this year is $25 billion.
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That is spent, billion with a B, which is spent trying to capture,
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incarcerate, deport, and separate families.
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It's the amount of money that corporations are making often on the suffering
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of immigrants, on the backs of immigrants.
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And it's our tax dollars. And I don't think many Americans know about this.
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So I felt that that would be an important contribution that we could make.
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And actually, the border industrial complex and the digital humanists,
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the XP method, is the thread that weaves the personal stories all together.
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Because what film does really best is give you an emotional experience that you may not have had.
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But our films also give you a lot of facts. So you can take the emotional and
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the factual and together it's a powerful combination.
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It really is. It's the secret sauce, I think, that makes this film really powerful.
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And I want to talk about both things, the human stories and the data,
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but let's start with Gabriela and Kaj.
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Pamela, what was your goal or what was your message with sharing their experiences?
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Well, this film took five years to make, and a lot happens in the lives of people over five years.
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What I really wanted to show was that immigrants coming to this country or people
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living without documentation in this country are powerful. They have agency.
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They have ways of strengthening their communities. They're building networks. They're thriving.
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And they're also teaching people about their constitutional rights in the United States.
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I wanted to create a counter-narrative to the mainstream media that says that
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immigrants are victims, that they don't know what they're doing,
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that they're just coming here for economic reasons.
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And I wanted to show, I feel like even in the darkest of days,
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there are always people finding a way forward.
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And the protagonists in our films are always people finding that way forward.
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They may personally be experiencing a lot of difficulties and struggles,
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and certainly Kash and Gavriela are, and they take the audience with them on
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these very difficult journeys that they're embarking upon.
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But at the same time, they're exhibiting extremely courageous behavior,
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and I think that courage is contagious.
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So when you see Borderland, the line within, you don't leave the cinema depressed.
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You leave the cinema thinking, I could do that.
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I could add my tiny grain of sand to welcoming immigrants into this country,
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just the way that Gabriela and Cash and the digital humanists like Alex Hill are doing.
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Yeah. Yeah, that really comes through. There's a sense, whether it's through
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MILPA, right, or the Border Network for Human Rights, two of the organizations
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that surface in the film is very involved, but there's this whole network of,
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organizers, activists, people who just feel passionate about this that are involved
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in building power for a pro-immigrant world. And that really comes across.
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One scene in the film, though, that really, for me, drives home the humanity
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of the people who are going through our immigration system is the Hugs Not Walls scene.
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Do you know the scene I'm talking about? Can you talk about that?
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Sure. Hugs Not Walls was a brilliant idea by the Border Network for human rights
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to kind of do a social and political jujitsu against the border patrol.
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So the idea is that people from Mexico and people from the United States,
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families who have been separated and cannot see each other, come together in
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the middle of the Rio Grande River for three minutes to hug each other.
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And what it shows is the kind of love that can be embodied in protest,
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the love that families have for each other and what it took them to get to the
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border to have three minutes.
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But I think it also underlines, that love also underlines the extreme cruelty
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of families being separated.
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So you have these dueling emotions going on and you get to meet many of the
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people who are hugging their family members.
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And it really stays with you on a very deep emotional level.
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So it's both emotional, it's political, It's about human rights.
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And it's a creative way of political maneuvering.
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Yeah, it's, it's beautiful and really effective and it does stay with you.
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And I'll just say, you know, Kaj, he, he comes off, he's so humble and lovely
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and soft-spoken, but boy, is he courageous.
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He, you know, going through what he went through, needing to leave Guatemala
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for his own safety, right, as an environmental activist and needing to flee because of the threats.
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And just the way that he was courageously documenting his own journey for this
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film is very powerful, very powerful, very courageous.
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And I do want to emphasize that that's one of the things that comes through
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in this film is that there is power, right?
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Immigrants have agency and power and are using that to work towards transforming
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our country's immigration system.
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So let's shift to the data because I have a lot of questions there.
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You took a Freedom of Information Act request, right, and data from ICE and
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created these stunning visualizations.
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And I'm looking at Alex because I have so many questions.
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These visualizations that really drove home the massive operation that is the
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border industrial complex. And I'm thinking about these maps,
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right? The map of the U.S.
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With little red dots that show everywhere in the country where there is a detention
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facility, and they're everywhere in the most unsuspecting places.
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And then the graphic with the little black spikes, I mean, all of that is just,
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you can say numbers, and I think many of us, or at least I'm speaking for myself,
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you throw numbers at me, my brain will You know, go somewhere else.
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But when you show exactly where, you know, the prevalence of these facilities, it's alarming.
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And so and then the billions of dollars changing hands. Alex,
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were you surprised by anything that you learned when you were going through the data?
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Yeah, starting with the sort of geographical extent of the facilities that ICE has access to.
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The first surprise was, of course, finding out how deep into the United States
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heartland this infrastructure reaches.
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And it was actually on day three of the project where we, this graphic,
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it was one of our earliest exploratory graphics.
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It's the first thing you do when you get a large data set as you go through
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this process of doing what is called exploratory analysis, where you just like
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throwing things against the wall to see, you know, where, what sticks,
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what patterns grab your attention.
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And when we saw this one, not only were we surprised, we also knew that it was
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going to be our flagship image, the one that welcomes users to the sun.
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And it was actually, we, our instincts were right because this is the graphic
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that actually was grabbed by the press right away.
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Wired Magazine was the first one to write an article on this data.
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And AP picked it up, Washington Post and others.
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And it was this image that communicates very easily to a lay audience that ICE
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is everywhere, that the border is everywhere.
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There were others, of course, other surprises.
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One of the things that we found surprises is in that graphic where we connect
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direct ICE contracts to political districts.
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We were surprised to see how evenly distributed ICE investments are amongst
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Democrats and Republicans.
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We didn't expect that. We expected most of the contracts to go to Republican
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districts, and we were kind of taken aback a little bit by the fact that contracts
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are pretty much evenly distributed among bipartisan amounts.
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You talk about some of the contracts, where the money is being spent.
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Were there any contracts specifically that surprised you?
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Because I saw a few in the graphics where they're sort of flowing across the screen.
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There were a few that grabbed my eye, but I wonder if there were any that grabbed your attention.
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Yeah. So the data we're working with for those visualizations come from uspending.gov,
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which get a very detailed description of all these contracts.
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The data that is sitting in the government servers has something like 900 columns
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per row. each row representing a contract.
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And obviously in the visualizations, we just grabbed some of the most relevant
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columns to us, including the names of the company, but also the type of services they provide.
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And something that we also renamed in the process because the government data
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uses the NAFTA agreement to determine how to call things.
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So for example, if a company is selling selling faith show recognition software
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or hardware that would be described as electronics, but electronics doesn't
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tell us much about what's going on.
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So we actually went through every contract and tried to figure out what they were doing.
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So some of those companies that we found surprising, companies we can call them,
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were institutions or groups, for example, were universities.
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And universities were selling.
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Educational material. Well, that's how it's listed under NAFTA, right?
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But then we do a little bit of research and try to find out what do they mean
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by educational materials.
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It turns out sometimes what that means is that they make immigrants in detention
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watch these videos about how they're breaking the law.
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It's a sort of like Orwellian, you know, scene where you're being,
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you know how we all get to watch these really boring HR videos, right?
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But they're watching a video that is telling them basically,
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you know, why they're breaking the law and why they must be separated.
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It's a kind of re-education going on there, which I think adds to this idea
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that the whole system is based on cruelty, not necessarily, you know,
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our limited resources or whatnot, right?
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Right, right. Yeah, it's one of the, so again, when I say I felt every emotion,
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you know, there's anger too, when I'm seeing this and seeing how much money
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we're spending and how cruel we are to immigrants fleeing countries.
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And specifically, right now, I'm thinking of Central American countries where historically,
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the US has played a role in destabilizing those countries, right,
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in creating some of what individuals are fleeing, and they're fleeing to this
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country, And then they experienced that.
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So, Alex, in the film, you draw a line between the border industrial complex
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and the rise of fascism in our country.
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And at one point, you asked this question, what if we knew the infrastructure
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that Hitler was building before World War II? What would we do with that knowledge?
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Can you talk about that? What did you mean by that? Well, let's talk first about
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the infrastructure that Hitler was building in the 1930s, so that we get a sense
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that we can understand the context here.
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He didn't go straight up to concentration camps for Jewish folks and other minorities.
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In the 1930s, they started developing medical infrastructure to house people with disabilities.
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This was part of their effort to purify the nation.
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They wanted able-bodied Germans. They wanted the strong race to dominate, right?
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That meant that people with disabilities could not be part of this future that they imagined.
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So they started building this kind of infrastructure to more or less start rounding
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up people with disabilities.
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That's the same infrastructure that was then transformed into the concentration
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camps that led to the death of millions of people.
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Now, in the United States, now we have this infrastructure that's being built
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up slowly, but surely growing every year around ICE and immigration.
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Now, when we start looking at our data, we start looking at Obama,
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and it's already growing during the Obama regime.
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And it's all driven by this idea that we must fix the immigration system.
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We must fix the immigration system. Then it's taken by Trump,
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who surrounds himself with Christian nationalist people and people with extreme
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ideas like Stephen Miller and others.
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And then all of a sudden, this seemingly innocuous infrastructure is now in
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the hands of people who believe that we should expel everybody.
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In fact, they were using the whole line that Trump repeats now in his rallies
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these days about expelling 12 million people. He was using similar language back then.
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And of course, there has been analysis done by experts on the capacity of the
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infrastructure to be able to enact this massive deportation.
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And there was an article in The New York Times a couple of months ago that said,
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oh, but they just don't have the infrastructure yet to do it,
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to do the whole thing, right, to do 12 million.
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But, you know, that was never the point. The point is that you can already do
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a lot of damage just in trying with the infrastructure that you have right now.
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You're already going to separate enormous amounts of families,
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but you're also risk bloodshed on the streets.
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And the neighbors actually see a family that they love being taken apart in
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a country that is already really divided.
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There's a potential there for violence. There's a potential for violence in
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the encounter between a State Department run by Donald Trump and, you know, citizens.
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He's already expressed that he's willing to get a tough hand,
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you know, with the protesters.
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So this is what we meant in our conversations around the project.
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We were seeing the actual material infrastructure. We were seeing the finances behind it.
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And we say, what does this enable and what can this enable?
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It's different if you attach it to a democratic rhetoric, democratic in the
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sense of the Democratic Party, to a rhetoric of fixing the immigration system,
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which just puts a smiley face on these family separations, but it has a lesser
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potential for violence than this other rhetoric that comes from the fascists,
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right? That's what we meant.
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And, of course, infrastructure, like I said, with the example of Hitler,
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can be transformed, can grow, or can be repurposed to do some serious damage like Hitler did.
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Well, just if I can get in for a minute, in so many of these detention centers
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are actually county jails.
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So talk about repurposing. I mean, these county jails weren't built to be detention
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centers for immigrants, but they've been turned into that.
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And they're a way to funnel immigrants from those smaller facilities to the
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larger facilities, and then eventually deportation.
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So it's just a big sort of flowing system.
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And we always ask ourselves, looking back at history, what did we know and when did we know it?
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And I think what we're trying to say in Borderland, The Line Within,
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is, okay, now you know the extent of the border industrial complex.
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And us, we citizens, participation in it through our tax dollars.
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And now you know it and you know the extent of it. So we must act.
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Yeah, we get asked that question at every screening we've done on this 26-city
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tour around the country.
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People always want to know, what can I do? What can we do? And we always encourage
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them to not try to tackle the federal government, but to work at the local level.
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Find out what your representative is doing, what contracts exist.
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Usspending.gov is a resource that anybody can go to and plug in.
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And we have on our own website as well.
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We've copied a lot of that information like you can see at the congressional
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district and how to access that information.
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Every congressional district, every representative, and the amount of money
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as of 2023 that is going to that district and to what companies.
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You know, and it's really interesting, too, because on our website,
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we also put a form that's host your own screening.
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And we did it without, you know, we had no idea how much it would be used, but it's been enormous.
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And to the point where we have a map on our website of screenings that have
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been requested. And that map is starting to look like the map of the detention
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centers, except it's screenings.
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You know, it's interesting. There are these groups, all these small community
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groups, church groups, immigration rights groups, legal groups are surfacing
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all over the country through this hostial screening site.
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So that's actually becoming a resource because we have now we have contact information
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for all of these groups that have surfaced.
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That's incredible. Yeah, there's so much we can do.
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Yeah. What is your website for people to go to?
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Our website is skylight.is, skylight.is, and look for borderline there, and you'll get there.
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And that's where people can get to the map. And where can people see the data?
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Are those data, the data maps are on there as well, the visualizations?
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The visualizations are live, and the data is accessible, but the website is
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a little bit more complicated than skylight.is. Yes, I hesitate to start reciting it.
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But if you Google torn apart separados, or use your favorite search engine,
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I didn't mean to do a plug for the Google company.
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Just search for torn apart separados.
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Maybe add my name next to it. You should be able to arrive at the data.
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And the visualization is live.
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They look, I have to say, One of the things that has been really beautiful about
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this process of working with Akko and Pamela has been the great pleasure of
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seeing a data project on the big screen.
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And of course, it went through some design touches.
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You know, something like us academic geeks don't necessarily spend that much time on design.
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But in the film, these graphics come to life in a way that we can never hope
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for in the original project.
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But the hard data is there.
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The slightly more involved analysis is there for anybody listening in.
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Can you talk, Alex, about the other visualization that you did of the country
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with the black spikes coming out? What was that?
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Talk about that map. What were you representing there?
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So imagine an aerial view, satellite image of the United States of America for
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the audience listening in and not looking at the graphic.
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And then you see this series of spikes, black spikes, like needles,
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puncturing the country.
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The size of those spikes represents the amount of people that get deported from
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a deportation point. This could be an airport.
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This can be a bus stop.
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And all the places at which we, this is the last place the person being deported
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sees in the United States, right?
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We can be at exit points. Now, one of the things that we try to do there is show graphically,
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not represent the data graphically, but also putting on our humanist hats,
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you know, trained in art and history to connote beyond just simply them showing you the data,
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to connote this idea of separation of the country being ridden by these stakes,
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you could call it, just being stabbed by these stakes.
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Every time one of these lines grows and the stake grows, we're talking about people.
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We're talking about people who are losing their wife, their kids,
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their husband, their cousin, their uncle, et cetera.
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That's what we're doing with that graph. And you'll find that kind of graphic
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sensibility in many of our representations of this data.
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That's always that humanist sensibility that puts the human at the center, right?
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So in a sense, a lot of our graphics are not the kind of thing you expect from
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a social scientist who has very kind of like cold, strict forms of graphical representation.
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We do a lot more to try to connote that humanity.
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I'm glad you explained because, sorry, we, one question we get asked at every
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screening too is what the heck is a digital humanist? And did you guys make that up?
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Yeah, I did want to ask that question because I've heard of data scientists,
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I've heard of data nerds, data engineers, but I've never heard the term data humanist.
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And in the film, there are three of you, right?
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Three of you that work together going through the ICE data.
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So what is a data humanist and how did the three of you come together?
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Do you normally work together or was that for this film?
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I, the digital humanist, data humanist works, but the accepted term within the
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profession is digital humanist.
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I did not come up with a term. The term dates back to 2002, 2003,
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but before it were called humanities computing, this field.
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And it dates back to the beginning of the Cold War, when people interested in
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literature, history, et cetera, started using computers to do our work.
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So it's an old tradition.
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People are welcome to search for the words digital humanities.
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And you'll find a relatively useful Wikipedia article, more or less outlining
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what we have done. But the short answer of this is basically people trained
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in the humanities who develop these computational skills.
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And what happens when we do that is different types of approaches to these data issues, right?
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So my PhD is in English.
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I just published a book on French surrealist poetry in the Caribbean in the 20th century.
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So I was like, this is the humanist part, right? The digital part is the part
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where I am quite capable of doing data science with the best of them.
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It's amazing. It's amazing. So many people ask us about that in the screenings too.
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And I always say, well, in the film, we take you on the same journey that we
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went on because we didn't know what a digital humanist was either.
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And then we started to work with Alex and the X-Free Method.
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And we came to understand that not only was it these three, but it was a whole
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field with conferences with 500 people.
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And this is a revelation to the audiences. And it was to us, too.
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Yeah, slowly starting to sit it into the mainstream.
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I've seen it on The New York Times this year without an explanation.
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So that's already a positive something that maybe people are starting to know
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what this is. To answer your question about the team, so Rupik Arism and Manana Ahmed were just...
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Part of a, of a larger team that worked on this project that involved several Fronterizas.
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Also digital humanists, and my dearest, most dear, Pidesa Pereira,
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who is, was at NYU at the time, but then was transitioned to Colombia.
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All of us immigrants in this team, we lost one person right after the project
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was done, Linda Rodriguez,
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who was one of our Fronterizas scholars that was working on this she had
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terminal cancer when she started working on this project oh no
28:27
and she used the last weeks on her life to
28:30
to to work on this project because she understood the
28:33
importance she was such a great person though like imagine like you you just
28:37
have weeks to live and you're gonna dedicate yourself to to you know work on
28:40
a project like this and to to fight for immigrants she herself being an immigrant
28:45
i'm still kind of get goosebumps just thinking about her yeah yeah and And, you know,
28:52
that was one of the other takeaways for me was the power inherent in having
28:56
three digital humanists who are immigrants going through this ICE,
29:03
these ICE data and presenting these incredible graphics and just the analysis
29:10
coming from three immigrant digital humanists was very powerful.
29:15
Also, another takeaway for me, Paco and Pamela, I know you've been touring the
29:18
country, you're screening this film across the country.
29:22
What has the response been from people who come to your screenings?
29:26
One of the biggest responses, and it happens at every screening,
29:31
is this kind of shock at what you experienced, Victoria, too,
29:36
looking at these graphics and getting an idea of how vast the extent of the
29:43
border industrial complex and the cost of it.
29:45
And you know we've had people who have come up to
29:48
us afterwards just really angry i can't
29:51
believe that guy kicking over the water and i'm paying for
29:54
him with my taxes you know that's just outrageous that kind
29:57
of that kind of emotion right where suddenly you
30:00
feel like you're paying for this war on immigrants because it's really you know
30:04
for example those recruitment videos they're like recruitment videos for going
30:09
to iraq or afghanistan i mean but it's here in our own country that they're
30:14
recruiting people to do that kind of military work.
30:17
And so all of that is very shocking. And then in contrast to that,
30:21
also this incredible, you know, their move.
30:24
You know, so many people say, I cried through the film because of the stories
30:28
with, you know, Kansh and Gabriela that aren't really, they're not tragic stories, but they're very,
30:34
you know, creates a lot of empathy because the reason I say they're not tragic
30:38
is because they actually are, They have a lot of agency, they're organizing,
30:42
and, you know, they're taking charge and building political power.
30:47
So, you know, and Gabriela, in many Q&As that we've had her at.
30:51
She always tells the audience, look, we're not looking for saviors here.
30:55
We're looking for allies. What we need is allies, not saviors.
30:58
And I think that's something that comes across in the film as well.
31:01
I've been really struck by how engaged the audiences all are and how after the
31:09
film's over, they don't leave.
31:10
They won't leave. And we've even had Q&As like in Tucson, there were 200 people at the screening.
31:17
And we talked for an hour afterwards. The theater was really great.
31:21
But then they had to start the next film.
31:23
They asked us politely to leave and still no one left.
31:26
And so they had to start the next film with the sound up really loud.
31:29
And that's because this is a conversation.
31:32
This is a story that we're not hearing around the country. It's a we're saying
31:38
there is a different way to welcome immigrants into this country.
31:42
There is a different way for us to have immigration.
31:45
Immigration is not a problem. We need immigrants.
31:49
We need people to work and we benefit. You know, we live in New York City and
31:53
New York City is 25 percent immigrant.
31:56
And it has been for the last hundred years. Different waves of immigrants. But look at the city.
32:01
I mean, it is a powerhouse. It has culture.
32:06
Its economy is doing well. The gastronomy, all the things that we love about
32:12
New York City is so much a result of the immigrants that live there now and
32:17
that have passed through there in the past.
32:19
I think the other thing is that people start to think, after they see Borderland,
32:24
The Line Within, they start to think about their immigrant ancestors,
32:28
if you have immigrant ancestors.
32:30
And aren't they the heroes in the stories of our families?
32:34
Aren't they the ones that really make up the backdrop of who we are and how
32:41
we've thrived in this country?
32:43
So audiences really connect to that. And I think it gives them a way to also
32:49
talk about immigration in this very energized political season.
32:54
And we're hoping that the film, you know, one of the effects it can have is
32:58
we're basically planting seeds with this tour.
33:01
And by the way, if somebody wants to check out the tour, it's on Instagram, Skylight Picks, P-I-X.
33:08
You can, you know, at Skylight Picks, you can follow this tour and hear some of the Q&As.
33:14
But it's basically about reframing the story, the narrative.
33:17
We feel that the immigrant story should be a hero story, a hero narrative.
33:21
And these are folks who, you know, they risked their lives to find a better
33:25
life for themselves and their families.
33:27
And they helped build our country.
33:29
And, you know, it's really a hero story.
33:32
Where can people watch Borderland The Line Within?
33:35
Stay tuned to our website, again, skylight.is. And we very soon,
33:41
you know, we'll have a link up so you can stream the film at home.
33:44
Amazing. That's going to happen as soon as we finish the tour.
33:47
And we're just finishing now a really great study guide to go along with it.
33:51
So if you're a high school teacher or a college professor, or you want to lead
33:57
your community group in studying the ideas in the film, that's available also for free.
34:03
That's incredible because this film, Borderland, The Line Within,
34:07
does serve as a call to action.
34:09
And I think that's why people don't want to leave the theater because there's a sense of what can I do?
34:13
How can I get involved? And that's a beautiful thing. There are a lot of people
34:15
in this country who believe in
34:17
our shared humanity and in our interconnectedness and will get involved.
34:22
We just have to reach them. So everybody, go to Skylight.is and watch Borderland,
34:28
The Line Within. And Pamela, Paco, and Alex, thank you so much for your time.
34:34
Congratulations again on this important work, and I wish you all the best.
34:38
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Victoria.
34:40
Thank you. Thank you, Freedom to Thrive. I want to thank our listeners for spending time with us.
34:46
For more immigration truths, visit us at nilk.org and freedomtothrive.com.
34:51
And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
34:54
I look forward to continuing this conversation with all of you.