Who gets to stay and who’s forced to leave? A conversation about deportation

Filmmaker Alex Rivera has been telling stories about the border and the lives of immigrant communities for nearly 30 years. For him, questioning certain narratives and telling these stories with more depth and thought, is critical.

“It’s such an incredible time right now because we see, just in the national political conversation, that there are so many stories to be told. This is a moment when it’s very, very clear that, for this country, questions of who belongs, who’s an insider, who’s an outsider—which are questions of borders and migration—are so central to this moment,” he says. “It’s what’s being talked about by political leaders, perhaps more than anything, is who gets to come and go, who gets to live here, who can make a claim to being an American, who cannot. So, these are not questions about the perimeter, they’re not questions about the outer edges; these are questions at the center of this moment.”

There are seemingly endless headlines about deportations, right now, in the United States—from the Boston college student deported to Honduras during the Thanksgiving holiday, to self-deportations, to a 6-year-old boy in Queens, New York who was separated from his father and placed in federal custody during ...