By Crispian Balmer
VENICE, Sept 7 (Reuters) – Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras said on Monday she hopes a new documentary about U.S. immigration raids will help “denormalise” violence under President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, the 25-minute documentary “They’re Here”, co-directed by Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller, follows volunteers in Minneapolis as they track the movements of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducting deportation operations earlier this year.
“The reality is a nightmare. The entire country is under attack and immigrants are living in fear throughout the United States right now,” Poitras said ahead of the screening.
CONFRONTING PROTESTERS IN THE SNOW
Trump launched his deportation drive immediately after taking office in January 2025. He has defended ICE’s tactics and argued that people who entered the U.S. illegally must be sent home.
The Minneapolis sweep drew weeks of demonstrations and confrontations between protesters and ICE agents in which immigration officers shot dead two U.S. citizens.
“In the mainstream media, this kind of violence is being normalised. We believe very strongly in the power of cinema to denormalise this violence and to show what’s happening,” Poitras told a news conference.
Poitras, whose full-length documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” won Venice’s top Golden Lion prize in 2022, said she and Mueller decided to make a much shorter film because they felt it was urgent to show immediately what was happening.
Shot largely from the perspective of local residents tracking the movements of ICE teams, “They’re Here” cuts between volunteer dispatch networks and the story of a Mexican man hiding from immigration authorities with the help of his son.
The documentary shows locals plotting the routes of unmarked ICE cars, masked agents confronting protesters on snow-covered streets and handcuffed detainees boarding deportation flights.
COMMUNITY RESPONSE
The Minneapolis crackdown became one of the flashpoints in the broader deportation campaign and the U.S. administration eventually scaled back the operation after months of unrest.
Mueller said the filmmakers wanted to document both the scope of the anti-migrant sweep and the community response it provoked across the city.
“The resistance remained one of documentation more than anything else, precisely because it was about keeping people safe rather than fighting ICE,” she said. “These are our neighbours, and we don’t want them stolen from us.”
She said the eventual drawdown on ICE operatives showed that the community action had worked.
“ICE removed 80% of its agents. So there was a real response to this kind of resistance, which I think we can all take hope from,” she said.
(Reporting by Crispian Balmer;Editing by Alison Williams)
