Get Out. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Purge. All three films build on an august tradition of using horror as a Trojan horse to comment on the social, political and racial anxieties of their day. They’re Here, a new documentary featured in this year’s New York film festival, flips the script. Directed by Rachel Lauren Mueller, a journalist, and Laura Poitras, Academy award-winner, the 24-minute film employs horror tropes to re-examine the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offiers in Minneapolis last winter. “For filmmakers and journalists, there’s a great sense of responsibility in these moments when they arise,” said Mueller, a Minneapolis resident. “This is my neighborhood. It was my community. It was very clear to me what my role in this moment would be.”
Framed as a dystopian story set in an urban tundra, They’re Here follows the Trump administration’s border control campaign in Minnesota – officially dubbed Operation Metro Surge. Over the course of three winter months, the Department of Homeland Security moved to remove the Twin Cities’ Somali immigrant population and destabilize its progressive political order. The documentary takes in the wanton shock-and-awe campaign and scales it down to the battlefield, following Minneapolis residents as they evade and resist ICE and customs and border patrol agents – obscuring the residents’ identities for protection.
It opens on an overcast, -10F (-23C) day with one woman who goes by the pseudonym “Liz Lemon” on a conference call with other vigilant members of her community as she follows an ICE detail patrolling her neighborhood. When the agents make as if to leave, only to lead her back to her own front door and point at it, she fumes: “Are you pointing to my house like I don’t know where I live? Fuck off!”
They’re Here’s tapestry of dashcam video, counter-surveillance and crowdsourced footage from the ground puts viewers in the thick of the anxious moment. The directors say their film and its tone were inspired by a 10-second Instagram post of a winter’s drive through the woods, overlaid with a soundtrack that rivaled Prince in its resonance across the Twin Cities – replete with honking horns, whistles and cries to “close your doors” as balaclava-shrouded ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents crash into their daily routines. The film’s title borrows from another citizen callout – the most resigned of them all, perhaps. “One of the things we’re trying to do with this film is put the audience in a position of terror and fear,” said Poitras.
They’re Here doesn’t just chronicle the disruptions to quotidian life – an apartment view of a quiet intersection suddenly turned into a chaotic backdrop by federal agents in gas masks firing smoke bombs to clear the streets after the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents. It pushes in on the violence: one agent rag-dolling a female protester to the icy pavement, others pepper-spraying citizens right in the eyes. It captures Greg Bovino, the notable federal law enforcement officer in this hellish tableau whose face wasn’t obscured, charging into a crowd of protesters and backing down one guy shielding himself with his bike. “You hit me with that bike, you’re done,” the former ICE majordomo snarls.
Even more stunning than the scene is the source of that footage: a pair of Chicago teenagers who had been tracking the national ICE crackdown independently. “I didn’t know them at the time, but we were all at that moment together,” said Mueller, reflecting on a filmmaking responsibility that morphed from a journalistic call of duty to a personal shield. “There was a moment when I’m out of the car and there was an ICE agent threatening to smash this person’s window, and he’s screaming. I’m maybe 6ft away and my camera, a DSLR, is not small. But the [agent] turned, saw the camera and took a step back – like he was really startled by how big it was. There was a physical barrier with this particular camera, but ICE agents were seeing it in a different light than the rest of the documentation that was happening.”
Just as powerful are the scenes from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport – of detainees in the frigid cold, wearing little more than shackles and a prison jumpsuit, being herded onto noncommercial airliners before being secreted off to any number of federal detention centers across the country or deported away entirely – as visuals by professional plane watcher Nick Benson and data journalist Josh Begley makes clear. It all unfolds with the understanding that travelers rushing to catch their connecting flights – who aren’t shown – have scant awareness of the horror they’re passing through.
But the heart of the film is Edén Villa, a pseudonymed Latin American immigrant who is seen (but never pictured) and heard as he’s being smuggled to work in the trunk of a car. It’s a risk, sure – but, as he implies, any extended home hideout would depend on a steady job to maintain cover. It’s the kind of personal testimony that breaks Operation Metro Surge out of the news cycle into the realm of art as a historical artifact. “It just grows out of this long-standing belief I’ve had that cinema can help understand moments we’re living in – particularly political moments or moments of crisis, moments of violence, moments of extreme state abuse of power,” said Poitras, who has returned to these themes often in her films on fellow chroniclers Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. “We have these tools that can get at truth in different types of ways that are emotional.”
And even though DHS’ recent change in tactics, from shock-and-awe to blending into the background and lying in wait, would seem to suggest that the federal government’s offensive has only evolved, the fact that it was even forced to turn down the temperature gives this horror story satisfying heroes: Minnesota residents who were clearly underestimated as hapless victims. “There’s a history of resistance here that goes back decades,” Mueller said. “Early labor movements started here. The American Indian movement started in the Twin Cities. The resistance that happened in Minneapolis would not have been possible if the networks weren’t in place after the uprising after George Floyd’s murder. And that uprising wouldn’t have happened if Philando Castile hadn’t been killed. Each one of these pieces builds upon itself.”
They’re Here screened at the New York film festival with UK, Australia and further US screenings to be announced
