Hannah Arendt’s phrase about the banality of evil inevitably comes to mind when watching ICE agents in an immigration court in New York, where a judge decides on migrants’ applications for legal status. Independent to the ruling, migrants are sometimes arrested right outside the courtroom by ICE agents, to be deported—turning courthouses into deportation traps.
While waiting in the courthouse, the ICE agents, some of them masked, casually chat about Black Friday deals and the latest model of electroshock weapon. Their behavior contrasts starkly with the despair of the migrants. The only protection for most migrants without lawyers is provided by human rights activists.
An ICE supervisor reveals her racism and disdain for these activists when she snaps at one of them that they would feel differently if their mother were “raped by a criminal illegal alien”—implying that ICE primarily apprehends undocumented migrants with criminal records. But that is not the reality: an onscreen text at the end of this observational film states that, of the 230,000 undocumented migrants deported the previous year, just five percent had a criminal conviction.
Stills
