As immigrant communities across the U.S. brace during a period of raids and intensified threats of deportation, I think of the morning Gilbert Mejia woke up in his bed, opened his eyes, and saw an ICE agent standing above, pointing a gun at his head.
Gilbert, 19 years old at the time, was brought to the U.S. before his first birthday and clamored across the border hidden in the trunk of a car with his parents, Sam and Elida. The Mejia’s found their home in the Bay Area, worked hard, became upstanding citizens in their church and community, and grew their family with two U.S. citizen daughters.
One chilly morning, Sam was getting ready to go to work before the sun came up and had left the door slightly ajar as he went back to get something in the house. Suddenly, ICE agents stormed into the house, ostensibly looking for someone else with the same last name, and discovered that Gilbert and his parents were undocumented.
After a long legal battle, and as Gilbert’s case was delayed many times, Sam and Elida were ordered deported.
I first met the Mejia’s two weeks before Sam and Elida were to be deported. I came into their living room, sat down in the middle of the entire family, and made the pitch of why I thought it was crucial to create a documentary film about their experience, eventually to become Sin País (Without Country).
“All we hear about is numbers,” I said. “There are hundreds of thousands of people being deported from the U.S. every year, but we very rarely see and hear what that actually means for the extended family, the school the children attend, and the congregation the family is part of.”
As a documentary filmmaker, I essentially have to explain my intentions as a storyteller, describe what the process will be like, how much time/energy the filming process may require of the people involved, and where the film could be shown when completed. There is almost always one person in the family who either doesn’t want to be a part of the project, or doesn’t fully grasp how the finished product will benefit anyone.
The Mejia family was different.
Immediately, the matriarch of the family, Elida, said, “I get it. This film isn’t necessarily going to help us, but this is for everyone else to see what we go through. This film will be for everyone who has never met an undocumented person to see our true reality.”
After that, I was along for the ride. First as filmmaker, then advocate, friend, and finally part of the family.
Sin País is now featured on the storytelling platform ONWARD, which is specifically designed for faith-based communities to use film as a way to create productive dialogue around immigration issues.
See the film and download resources at ONWARD.SOJO.NET.
Throughout the process of filming, I was constantly struck with the question of “Why is this happening to these people?” Sam and Elida were some of the most kind, giving, hardworking, and honest people I’d ever met. Elida had two jobs, one as a nanny caring for a toddler since birth, and another as a domestic worker caring for a 99-year-old woman. She was literally caring for those just born, and those about to leave us. Sam was soft-spoken, a master carpenter who had built everything under the sun, and at the time was working for a company making gigantic houseboats, which would eventually sell for millions of dollars and float in San Francisco.
Family was everything to Sam and Elida. They kept a close eye on their teenage son and daughter, and had been working multiple jobs for decades to give their kids a better life than the one they were dealt in Guatemala.
On the day Sam and Elida we to be deported, I arrived at the airport, with the entire Mejia family, and was witness to one of the most intensely sad events I’ve ever seen: a mother and father saying goodbye to their children, not knowing when they would see them again.
As I drove home from the airport that night, I thought to myself, if every politician, faith-leader, and citizen in the U.S. could have met the Mejia family, and then seen the family ripped apart, the U.S. would not be deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year. The raids that are descending on immigrant communities right now, targeting Central American families who recently crossed the border escaping extreme violence, would most likely not be happening. The de-humanizing term ‘illegal alien’ would not proliferate across our airwaves.
After watching Sin País, many people tell me, “I just didn’t know it was like that. I had no idea what undocumented people went through.”
The film is homage to the experience of the Mejias, and to the millions of immigrants who have been deported from the U.S. in the last decades. As an ally to the undocumented community, it is a cry from a single filmmaker begging people to watch and listen to what just two people being deported looks like.
It is a vision of the future if we do not summon the power of our faith, our communities, and our country to fight for the rights of our neighbors, and demand justice for those that will wake up tomorrow to the sound of ICE banging on their doors.
Theo Rigby is a director, cinematographer, and interactive storyteller based out of San Francisco.
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