‘Guerrilla Habeas’ illuminates the brutality of Trump-era immigration policies – Contender Documentary

From separating families at the border to promising to build a massive wall between the US and Mexico, the Trump administration has been aggressively hostile to immigrants.

It was this politics that inspired directors Betsy Hershey and Emma Wall to create the documentary Guerrilla Habeaswhich focuses on the immigrant families whose lives were shattered by these laws and the fearless advocates and activists who fought to protect them.

Speaking on Deadline’s Contenders Documentary panel, Wall revealed why they felt compelled to make this film.

“We started this film at a time when I think so many of us were really shocked by what was going on in the immigration system,” she said. “So we started it in early 2019, after the Muslim ban, following Trump’s zero-tolerance policy that separated families at the border. And we – like so many people, I think, in this country – felt incredibly helpless and hopeless. It felt like these gross injustices, these human rights abuses, and we didn’t know what to do about it.”

In the making Guerrilla HabeasThe filmmakers quickly realized that they not only had to think about the story they were trying to tell, but also how to protect the people who were helping them tell it.

Wall told Deadline documentary filmmaker Matthew Carey, “During those years in the Trump administration, a lot of activists in the non-citizen community, people who worked on films, were targeted and deported for their involvement, so we wanted to be very careful about how we tell this story because it’s difficult to share.”

While it was the unnecessary brutality of the Trump administration’s immigration policies that first inspired them to make the film, co-director Hershey added that many of these policies have been maintained under Biden’s presidency.

“I think the most important thing to remember is that it didn’t go away when Trump left and the system continues to exist,” she said. “The system that allows what happens in this film stands. So until we fix the underlying issues, it doesn’t matter who’s in charge of government, because what we need is to keep families together in a system that keeps everyone safe.”

Check back Wednesday for the panel video.