Written and directed by Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera with help from Aldo Velasco
Starring Mohammad Abdollahi, Maynor Alvarado and Manuel Urzua
Running time: 1 hour and 35 minutes

by Samuel Antezana

A detainee at the Broward Detention Center for undocumented immigrants in Florida is taken into a metallic room with two guards and handcuffed to a chair. The guards get his wife on the phone and order him to tell her that he is doing fine. After hanging up, they threaten to deport her, which would leave their elementary-age child alone at home if he doesn’t board a plane to be deported. Don’t be fooled, this isn’t some gritty crime drama, it’s another day in the life of undocumented immigrants who are forced to endure the bullying and gang-like tactics of the ICE guards running these detention centers.

The Infiltrators is a documentary/thriller hybrid that follows a story from a couple of years ago. It concerns two young Dreamers, Marco ​Saavedra and ​Viridiana “Viri” Martinez, ​who are members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group whose mission is to rescue wrongly detained, undocumented immigrants that face deportation in detention centers in the U.S. Taking a page out of Nellie Bly’s famous 1887 covert operation inside a New York City asylum for the mentally ill, Marco and Viri hatch a plan with fellow Dreamer, Mohammad ​Abdollahi​, to infiltrate the Broward Detention Center after they receive a call from Emiliano Rojas, the son of an undocumented immigrant named Claudio, who has been wrongfully imprisoned in the detention center.

Marco and Viri both make themselves look and act like what Border Patrol would, most likely, buy as stereotypical representations of immigrants – work clothes, hats and poor English – to get detained at the doorstep of the detention center. Marco (portrayed here by Maynor Alvarado) is the first to be detained. His interaction with the detaining guard is reenacted, but the audio switches between the reenacted exchange and the audio that the real-life Marco recorded to Mohammed on his phone, which was in his back pocket during the conversation. This is the first strong demonstration of how directors Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra understand both narrative and documentary filmmaking by fusing both storytelling styles to create seamless shifts between real footage/audio and reenacted moments.

As we start to see Marco and Viri’s efforts (all of which are, for the most part, dramatically reenacted) to restrict the Broward Detention Center’s power to deport detainees slowly pay off, with the help of detainees like Claudio, we are also treated to the more complicated side of the Dreamers’ work that is done on the outside by people like Mohammad. This work consists of calls to various local government agencies to try and navigate the web-like system of deportation and get more detainees released. Credits to Rivera and Ibarra for not shying away from utilizing well-informed members of NIYA, such as Mohammad, to share their knowledge on the circumstances facing undocumented people across the country and what it will take to dismantle institutions like ICE.

As someone who doesn’t watch many documentaries, I was extremely drawn to The Infiltrators hybridization of traditional narrative and documentary footage/audio. The approach not only kept me engaged, but it also had me at the edge of my seat during several moments of genuine suspense. Being the child of two parents who risked their lives immigrating to the U.S. from South America, I became immediately invested in Marco and Viri’s mission. The informative explanations on ICE from Mohammad and other Dreamers, along with the fluid editing between real and acted scenes, combine to make a powerful entry in the continued fight to abolish ICE and protect undocumented citizens who are wrongly detained and face deportation to countries they ran away from, don’t belong in, or don’t have family in anymore.

The one drawback of the film, which is perhaps most obvious to anyone who tries to create a timeline for the events depicted, is that it precedes Trump’s election to the Oval Office. In the current administration, immigration guidelines have become stricter than ever with the reinforcement of ICE, making ​The Infiltrators ​feel like an early step in the fight against illegal detainment/deportation. Regardless, the voices of Mohammad, Marco, Viri, Claudio and many other immigrants are amplified by filmmakers like Rivera and Ibarra, who want more people to take notice and do something to further this long-lasting fight.

Available to watch via virtual cinema, find your theater here, on demand beginning June 2nd.