How an ICE Immigration Raid Tore Apart a Small Midwest Town
In his prior feature-length and short documentaries, director Rodrigo Reyes has investigated the North American immigrant experience via both intimate character studies (2016’s Lupe Under the Sun) and expansive expressionistic portraitures (2013’s Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border). His latest, After the Raid, is a combination of those two approaches, a poignant 25-minute short film that investigates the aftermath of an immigration raid through the lens of a wife and new mother left to fend for herself, a long-time resident trying her best to help in whatever way she can, and a priest tasked with bringing some measure of comfort—and solace—to his fractured community.
After the Raid (available on Netflix now) is a somber work that, for the most part, eschews contextual detail, employing canny aesthetics to evoke the larger issues, and tensions, at play. Reyes opens with creeping shots through first a dense forest, then a wooded road, and finally a street alongside a sprawling field under a big sky. We’re in farmland country—Tennessee, to be particular. Those initial images are followed by pans alongside a small collection of strip-mall shops and a gas station, and also a seemingly abandoned manufacturing plant. Life is hard to detect in this quiet landscape; what exists feels creaky, dilapidated, and bordering on the haunted, as if the spirit of the place has been sucked dry by some malevolent force.
Over views of the gone-to-seed factory, TV news voices provide a modicum of background. An IRS financial crimes raid at the local meatpacking plant in April 2018 snowballed, unexpectedly, into an immigration investigation. The business’ bosses, we’re informed, never asked their labor force who they actually were or—more crucially still—where they came from, opting instead to simply pay them with envelopes of cash. As one journalist says, “Many are calling this the largest workplace raid in the past decade.”