The Immigration Project

Short Synopsis

The Immigration Project investigates migrant deaths along the United States-Mexico border and the efforts of the Mexican Consulate of Tucson Arizona and the Office of the Pima County Medical Examiner to repatriate the reamins back to Mexico.

Description/Treatment

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In the 1990s, US government immigration policy shifted from a goal of apprehending individual border-crossers to a goal of deterring future crossings through geographical deterrence.  The theory was that remote desert areas such as the Tucson sector would deter potential migrants simply by virtue of their harsh geography.

This strategy of prevention through deterrence has had tragic consequences. Migrants continue to enter illegally and are now compelled to cross in the most dangerous and isolated locations, most often the Arizona desert. This has led to a huge increase in migrant deaths.  From 1985 to 1998, Border Patrol’s Tucson sector averaged 19 migrant deaths per year. In the last six years, deaths have averaged 200 or more per year.

Marco Williams’ Immigration Project tells the story of the migrants who die while trying to cross an unforgiving desert in search of a better life.

We begin with a dead body, grotesque and bloated from 30-degree temperatures and dehydration; at the moment they are found they are anonymous, Jane and John Does.  We follow that body from the desert to a forensic lab where investigators examine the corpse and its personal effects. A tattoo, a phone number written on the underside of a belt, maybe an ID card is found. These are the first steps toward identification.  A call is made to Mexico, a missing family member is revealed, an identification made.  We follow the body home, meet the man’s family; we learn who he was and why he left.  Now we have a human, a person, someone similar to you and me.  This transformation becomes the audience’s transformation.

The Immigration Project is woven from multiple narrative threads.  In Arizona, it depicts the efforts of the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) and the Mexican Consulate of Tucson to name unidentified dead border crossers.  It also follows the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol Search and Rescue (BORSTAR) agents, who balance law enforcement and lifesaving.  In Mexico, the film documents reunification of those who have died with their families.  The film also documents the experiences of migrants preparing to cross, who are all too naïve about the dangers they face.

Through these interconnected narratives the film ultimately makes comment on a failed United States immigration policy. 

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NARRATIVE TREATMENT:

Thirty miles south of the U.S. border, in Altar, Sonora, migrants from all over Mexico and Latin America gather in a dingy hostel. They pay a few pesos to sleep on a plywood bunk, waiting their turn to cross. Despite the blistering summer heat, they are hopeful for the future. Most have never crossed the desert, and have no idea what to expect.

Thirty miles north of the border, Border Patrol Search and Rescue (BORSTAR) agents set up an improvised emergency room. A migrant woman has collapsed in the day’s triple-digit heat. Landing on a rural field, agents carry the woman from a Blackhawk helicopter to the makeshift-triage. She is given intravenous fluids, and slowly becomes coherent. “She’s lucky,” says agent Jose Molina, “Another day of walking and we couldn’t have saved her.”

The United States Border Patrol is responsible for securing the border.   They are often called upon to search and rescue injured migrants and in some cases prevent desert deaths. Each year, Border Patrol’s Search and Rescue team saves thousands of migrants from certain death.  But not every mission has a happy ending, and very often it is BORSTAR agents who are called upon to recovery a body or the remains of a migrant who did not survive the desert crossing. 

At the PCOME in Tucson, medical investigator Gene Hernandez inspects a dead migrant and his personal effects. The young man was found without identification, so Gene digs deeper in search of clues. He knows all the hiding spots typically used by border crossers. Opening the seams of the dead man’s pants, he discovers three hundred dollars and a scrap of paper with several phone numbers. Beneath the insole of the left shoe, he finds a Mexican ID card, belonging to the dead man. Hernandez phones his friend Jeronimo at the Mexican Consulate.

Sitting at his desk, Jeronimo Ceballos picks up the phone.  He dials a long string of numbers, and takes a deep breath.  Jeronimo has the unenviable job of informing families when a loved one has died while crossing the desert.  Today he is calling a family in rural Veracruz to inform them that their father has died. His calm, dispassionate communication belies the pain his calls brings.  Despite his rock-steady demeanor, Jeronimo sometimes goes to his car and cries.  Later, he arranges for the body to be sent to a funeral home in Tucson and then flown by airplane to Mexico City where it is transported to the town or city of the relative.

This tragic pattern repeats two to three hundred times each year, with a hundred or more during the summer.  This process forms the narrative spine of The Immigration Project.

Access:

The Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner granted Marco Williams exclusive access to their work, from retrieval of the body, to autopsy, to forensic examination, to their collaboration with the Mexican Consulate.  The Mexican Consulate similarly agreed to allow the team to document the full scope of their work, and to document each body’s journey home to the family.

Repatriation of the remains offers a chance to meet and document the Mexican families of those that have died crossing the border. As of mid-August, trips have been made to two families, with many more scheduled. These meetings provide an opportunity to learn why Mexicans choose to come to the United States despite the costs, the risks and the hardships they suffer. They give insight to the economic and social conditions that compel Mexicans (and others) to risk money, separation from family, and ultimately death to come to the United States of America to work. And in so doing, these border crossers will become more than a statistic; they become visible as human beings.

The Department of Homeland Security granted the production twelve days to film the Border Patrol and Borstar operations in August.  Another 6 days of shooting are scheduled for late September. 

The production will spend seven days in September in Altar, Sonora, Mexico a hub for of migrants about to attempt or reattempt to cross.  Filming will take place at a shelter managed by the Catholic Church.  This shelter is a place of last resort for those who have tried to cross two and three times and are contemplating an additional attempt or else a return home. 

Visual Approach:

Narrative structure for documentary films has become fairly stagnant.  It has adhered to traditional narrative construct, borrowing or replicating the three-act structure from its fiction counter part.   Yet fiction filmmakers have broken the shackles of strict linear narratives.  Some of the most engaging fiction films have deviated from the straight line and chosen more elliptical story construct—Babel, Reservoir Dogs, Nashville, to name a few.

It is the aspiration of this documentary to emulate these narrative deviants. The Immigration Project proposes a structure more akin to Nashville, a film about a place, a milieu that is revealed through the parallel stories of the inhabitants of a single locale.  Babel tells the story of a moment in time through three parallel, almost interconnected narratives. The Immigration Project aims for a similar strategy.

This film is a Cinema Verite documentary.  Formal interviews are eschewed.  We learn and discover through observation. The filming simply follows the bodies, not just those that are identified and returned to their families, but also those that cannot be identified. The observed world will be punctuated occasionally with comments and explanations but these come from the content of the narrative not the inquiry or interrogation of the director.

In Arizona, the footage is shot exclusively handheld. In the medical examiner’s office, pristine white walls surround the dusty remains of dead border crossers. In the desert, the colors and sounds of the contrasting brown and green thorny landscape convey a sense of heat, life and death. In contrast, footage filmed in Mexico is shot very deliberately from a tripod. Carefully composed shots of the lush landscapes of the Veracruz mountains and the Oaxacan jungle, where rain seems to fall constantly.

The final film will not have a narrator.  It will be bi-lingual, in Spanish and English.  Subtitles will be employed. The film is being shot in HDV with final delivery in HD.