I cried a few times in watching this interesting film, interweaving real footage with a dramatized story of what happened when two DREAMers infiltrated a detention center.
It hurts my heart that these DREAMers are in this limbo. Their parents are undocumented, so they feel the pain and the injustice of that deeply. At the same time, they have more privilege, in that they qualify for DACA, allowing them to be in the country legally and work (although without a pathway to citizenship). They faced their own types of challenges though- like not qualifying for certain scholarships or tuition rates that they would have qualified for if they were citizens- making the price of college unmanageable. At the end, it is an outrage to see these young organizers, who helped free so many people within the detention center with their advocacy, not being able to go on to college. They were not in the best situations themselves, and yet they still put themselves on the line to help people who were in less privileged situations than them, immigration status-wise. They were so committed to revealing the unjust circumstances under which immigrants were being detained. The courage! To infiltrate a detention center, to secretly pass documents and to organize in order to keep people from getting deported, to protest and get arrested…
You can’t help but think, what else can I do? Who else can I help? Who is hidden away in a detention center, that needs access to justice?
