Two weeks after the largest raid of undocumented workers in U.S. history, filmmakers Jennifer Szymaszek and Greg Bronson started filming “In the Shadow of the Raid.” The documentary, which focuses on the consequences of the May 2008 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in which nearly 400 workers were arrested and deported, takes place in Postville, Iowa the site of the raid and in two rural villages in Guatemala where some of the deported workers were sent.
The raid occurred at Agriprocessors Inc., a kosher meatpacking plant. Following the closure of the plant, Postville businesses across the board failed and many livelihoods in the small Midwestern town were destroyed.
Guatemalan migrant Willian Toj, who was arrested in the raid, was sent back to his wife, parents and massive amounts of debt that he accrued getting to the U.S. He had started working in the meatpacking plant for 20 minutes before the raid took place. Now, he can barely make enough money to pay the monthly interest due on his $7,000 debt, not to mention provide funds to treat his mother’s cancer.
“In the Shadow of the Raid,” will be showing at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico, and a 15-minute version of the film was recently broadcast on PBS “Frontline’s” website. The tone of the documentary is mostly observational as the filmmakers tried to illustrate some of the realities that lead so many Central Americans and Mexicans to the U.S.
More information and the video can be found here.
The horrible mistreatment of Mexicans in the U.S. has always been misguided, and it’s time it changed in a major way. Instead of continuing the white supremacist apartheid foisted on Mexico in 1848, or trying to maintain a separate Mexican state that will continue to fail, let’s incorporate Mexico into the U.S. as 10+ new states sans the corrupt Mexican federal govt., and share the New World in a model bilingual nation. Click the Website to read about my nonpartisan Megamerge Dissolution Solution proposal for the Obama admin., which they would be wise to start in 2010 with our without a temporary fix amnesty that leaves the real problem festering.