We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and to the premium
version of our website as well. Today we are joined by the code director
of a fascinating film called Missing in Brooks County. Jeff Bmiss co directed that
movie. It just won a Peabody Award and we're excited to dig into it.
You actually may have seen it on PBS's Independent Lens where it aired back
in twenty twenty two. It is out streaming now. I highly recommend it.
Jeff, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Emily. Since it's
your first time on the show, could you start just by giving us a
little bit of background about yourself, how you got involved in filmmaking, and
then how you ended up making this particular film, Missing in Brooks County.
Well, my background is in scripted filmmaking. I went to USC Film School
and I kind of got into documentary along the way, and I met my
co director on this project, Lisa Malamott at Trinity College in Hartford, where
we were both teaching. She was I think I kind of ended up taking
her job as she moved on out to Arizona where she is now. So
I teach and right now I've been lately making documentary films. Lisa and I
got started on this project from an audio documentary that was on the radio and
it was an interview with a forensic scientist at Baylor University named Lorie Baker.
And I was just really moved by the piece, and I reached out to
Lisa and asked if she'd be interested in working on some thing, and that's
how it started. Laurie invited us out to Texas and she took us down
to this place called Fulfiias, Texas that we've never heard of. We we
thought we were going to the border, and she said, oh no,
no, that's We're seventy miles from the border. This is Brooks County.
It's not even a border county, but this is where the problem is.
And that was the beginning of a four year odyssey to capture what was happening
in Brooks County. And you know, my next question was actually going to
be tell US a little bit about Brooks County, and from the film,
it's it's my understanding that actually a checkpoint being in Brooks County is critical to
its place, not just in this film, but in you know, that
question of what happens after you cross right, So again it is this is
not a county that is on the border, and this checkpoint is what they
call an interior checkpoint, an immigration checkpoint. And being someone who lives in
the Northeast, I didn't even know we had such things in the United States
before this film. Even though we have over a hundred of them all across
the US. They're not all fixed like this when some of them move around,
but two thirds of the US population live inside at checkpoint zone because it
extends one hundred miles from all international and coastal boundaries, and it's a it's
an artifact of a relatively obscured nineteen seventies Supreme Court decision, and it's it's
had all kinds of unintended consequences, such as causing the deaths that you see
in the film, and yet it's never been re examined, and it has
hit Brooks County very hard because this is the busiest immigration checkpoint in the country
and it's it's right in Brooks County, so you know, it's essentially turned
Brooks County into a massive open grave where people are dying on these vast ranches
because they try to circumvent the checkpoint, right, okay, um, And
if you if you could tell us about so the story of the film is
really powerful, I think because it zooms in on these particular individuals, and
people should of course see the film to get the full story and obviously the
of visual and the filmmaking that advances those narratives. But if you could tell
us us a little bit about since you spend so much time intimately following these
cases, talking to family members about the ones that you follow in the film,
that would be great. We there's um, I guess there's mainly two
families that are highlighted in the film. One of them the Roman family.
They they lost their son or other Omero Roman, who had been brought to
the US at five years old, and then at thirty one years old,
after a traffic stop, he got deported and to a country that he didn't
even remember, and he just couldn't he just couldn't acclimate in Mexico. He
wanted to. He missed his family, and so he decided to come back
across the border in a clandestine crossing with a smuggler, and something happened along
the way and he went missing. And he's still missing, and his family,
you know, they keep hope that he's somehow alive somewhere, but they're
still searching for him. And we met the Roman family because we had started
filming and we put up a little website called with what we thought was a
temporary title missing in Brooks County, And meanwhile, the relatives of Omero were
searching using those terms missing in Brooks County in Texas, and our site came
up. They contacted us and we asked them. We had a meeting with
them in Texas over coffee. We said, look, you know, this
is what we're doing. Would you be interested in sharing Omera's story in your
story? And they went and had a family meeting and they came back and
very bravely said yes, we want Omera's story to be a part of your
film. Had to have been very, very difficult for them, but I
think I think it is the Ramond family that says, at one point they
believe any publicity, anything might be helpful to finding him. Am I remembering
correctly? It was them, or at least some of the folks you talked
to, said we want this because it might help find him. Yes.
They. One thing that working on this film has taught me is that I
believe having someone having a loved one missing is perhaps the worst thing there is.
I think it's actually worse in many ways than when someone dies, because
if someone dies, there can be a ceremony, there can be closure where
you can at least try to pick up the pieces and move on. But
when someone goes missing, if you love them, you're never able to close
the door. It's just an unending, infinite grief. The missing never never
die, and yet they never come home. So, as improbable as it
may sound, the Roman family hopes that Omero is still somewhere alive. And
that's one of the tragedies of what's happening, and it's it is portrayed in
the film. There's sort of two elements to this tragedy. One is when
someone's actively missing and there might be a chance of a rescue or to try
to prevent this from happening. But the other end of it is what you
see with the forensic sciences Kate Spradley in the film, many people who have
been found, their remains have been found, were just buried with no DNA
taken, no chance of ever being identified, and their families to this day
wonder what happened to them. So Katie's on a mission to exhume every set
of migrant remains in South Texas, identify them, and get them back to
their Family's unbelievable. And on that question, I wanted to also ask his
family holds out hope that he's alive somewhere. And there are certainly cases of
kidnappings, but the vast majority of people who run into trouble in places like
Brooks County, if they're missing, they likely are not alive. Could you
talk to us a little bit about what happens when people try to circumvent the
checkpoint? Where do things go wrong for them? How does how do these
tracks through the desert results in death in missing persons cases that so many of
them that we have right now. So this checkpoint is part of a policy
called prevention through deterrence that was put in place by the Clinton administration. Who
I would say that policy is most responsible for these deaths of any administration.
And what happens is people are driven to within a certain range of the checkpoint
and then they're taken out of the vehicles and they're led through these inhospitable branches.
This terrain is very dangerous terrain around the checkpoints, and there's several ways
that people can become lost and succumb to the elements. One way is simply
they can't keep up where they twist an ankle. These smugglers do not their
cartel members. Basically they all work for the cartels these days, and they
will not wait for them. So they're lucky if the smuggler even makes a
nine one one call, because they don't want to divulge their routes. And
so another way is if they're intercepted by border patrol, who does chase people
through the desert, or another group like the group you see in the film
that's sort of a kind of a vigilante group that supports the efforts of the
Border Patrol, the Texas Port of Volunteers. If if a group is intercepted,
they'll scatter, they'll run, and they get lost, and it is
very easy to get lost out there and then they'll eventually, you know,
they could succumb to all kinds of things, dehydration, heat strokes, snake
bite. I mean, it's it's just not a hospitable place to be.
And that speaks to something I imagine you heard from different people you talked to,
that the desperation. It's not as though people undertake these journeys without understanding
the risks involved. In fact, they know what brings them to the point
where they say, you know, I am actually going to not only am
I going to make this crossing, I'm going to pay to make this crossing,
I'm going to pay for the risk of possible death. It's an irresistible
question to ask after seeing this film. And just to be clear, none
of this is really in the film. This is kind of outside the scope
of the film. But you know, the people we talked to, I
think could fairly be described as refugees. I mean, I think most of
them these days, they do fit the definition. I think what people tend
to say is often I am coming to the US for a better life.
But that's a loaded phrase these days. And when I've talked a lot of
immigration attorneys as well as and they'll say yeah, But once you get to
know people and hear their stories, you'll find out there's actually something much much
deeper there. A better life often means I just want to live because there's
violence. There's you know, drug this force recruitment, gang recruitment is a
lot of drug drug violence. There's these days, there's climate displacement, and
there's crushing poverty. I mean to a point where people don't know where their
next meal is coming from. So a lot of people are fleeing for their
lives frankly, and they do know this as risky, but at least they
have a chance, and they feel that at home, they stay in their
current situation, they have no chance. Yeah. This was one of the
things. One of my big tape takeaways from going to um this I think
we started in Matamoros and then to Rainosa last year, was talking to some
of the Haitian migrants who had lived in Brazil or Argentina or even like Tijuana
for years. After the earthquake, they fled and so many of them were
willing to camp on the streets of rain Nosa under extremely dangerous conditions or cartel
kidnappings and murders left and right because they wanted to be in America. They
loved America. Actually, they said they wanted the American dream. And it's
so hard. I think we take for granted, you know what it's like
just just south of our border. And in the case of Amarrow, he
had been in the United States, he had seen the contrast, and that
must have been very powerful for him. Yes, he was. I mean,
he was raised as if he were an American citizen, which he was
not. He didn't have the documentation. He was five years old when he
was brought to the US. But this was his world. And he did
have some distant relatives in Mexico and he was happy to see them and they
were happy to see him. But he just couldn't adjust and he really missed
his immediate family. So he made a decision to come back to the US.
You know, I was talking with an immigration attorney recently and they said
that they're going right now. To be smuggled is fifteen thousand dollars. On
average, you get three attempts, and it's to a point where what we've
heard from Border Patrol is that these transnational criminal organizations who run the smuggling operations
are now making as much money smuggling people as they are drugs. I mean,
it's just these figures are staggering. You mentioned that it actually comes up
a couple of times in the film itself, these Clinton era policies, And
it's so rare that people actually talk about the immigration policies under Bill Clinton.
I mean, we hear a lot about Reagan, we hear a lot about
Bush, the second here actually a lot about Obama. But are there some,
including the Clinton policies you just mentioned, policies that are directly sort of
upstream of what you saw in Brooks County. And just again to be clear,
you know, the film is not political. It's a human story and
it really doesn't it doesn't get near any of this stuff. But it is
again a question, a natural question. I think. You know, when
you look at immigration right now in the headlines, it looks one way,
it looks kind of it breaks down fairly stereotypically left and right. It's kind
of what you expect, and that's the rhetoric. But when you look historically
at this issue, what's been what's been done in terms of policy action,
it's not that way at all. It really challenges your notion of traditional left
and right politics. So, like you said, Reagan gave amnesty bill.
Clinton's policies are probably most responsible for these deaths that are occurring. You know,
the only president to sign a bill that took any responsibility for these deaths
on behalf of the US government. This is going to blow some people's minds.
Is Donald Trump. I'm not saying he was a friend to immigration or
immigrants. But again, this issue, historically, it really does merge and
blend left and right politics. This is a bipartisan problem that we're having with
these deaths right now, and so the hope is that maybe there can be
a bipartisan solution. Well, and that's again one of the things that filmed
us so well, I think is give a try to think of the right
way to put this a fair shake in the sort of journalistic sense, to
the vigilante group you described earlier, some of their concerns, some of their
motivations that might be good, that might be bad, you know, even
something as simple as the water being left out on a ranch. Can you
tell us a little bit about what it was like to get in the minds
and sort of gain the trust both of law enforcement and the sort of self
appointed law enforcement in law enforcement in the volunteer groups. What was that like?
Yeah, the Texas Ford of Volunteers. It's I think it turn us
about three years of nagging them to get invited on one of their operations.
I'm not even clear that Mike Vickers, who is the sort of co founder
and leader of that group that you see in the film, has I assume
he has seen the film. We did show it and fell furious we invited
him. He wasn't able to be there. I guess some people have asked
us, how did you get them? How did you get that access?
Because it's kind of a condemning portrait of them. But I don't see it
that necessarily that way at all. And I don't think doctor Vickers, he's
a veterinarian. I don't think he would see it that way either. I
think he would watch him say, yeah, you let me say my piece.
That's how I feel, and now everybody can see the truth. It's
out there, you know, because he's got his own worldview. And what
we didn't want to do with the film was make a rant. I mean
it's we wanted to treat the audience like they're intelligent, they're capable of making
up their own mind about what kind of country they want to have. But
in order to do that, you have to witness. You just have to
see what's going on. So we wanted this film to be a three hundred
and sixty degree portrait of what's happening in Brooks County and then real quick about
the Border Patrol. Law enforcement has a lot of screen time, and the
people we were out with were actually a division of Border Patrol called Border Star,
and that's the search and rescue division. I think they come out of
the film actually fairly well. But what we noticed were most of the Border
Patrol people we talked to, they were really decent people doing a very difficult
job, and a lot of them were suffering from PTSD from these deaths from
dealing with them and to notify families m I want to ask more about that.
I do want to say, I think that's interesting because I come from
a very conservative perspective on immigration reform in general, and I thought the depiction
of the kind of vigilante group was very balanced and very fair. So it's
funny that other people had a different outlook on that because of the nuance between
both camps really comes out, and that's where it's most interesting. Anyway,
tell us more about Border Patrol, especially the search and rescue unit, that
you were able to get so much access to, about what they what they
are confronting every day. And that's one of the most powerful things of the
film is that you actually have footage of the scene when they're called to identify
bodies, when they're called to the desert to look at somebody with their backpack
strew next to them. What are they dealing with on a day to day
basis in Brooks County, one of agents of Border Patrol agents in the film,
he has a line that I think is pretty memorable. He says,
you know, we don't call them people anymore. We call them bodies.
Because if you start calling them people, then it starts getting to And this
was just one example of what we we're hearing from agents that it is emotionally
very hard to deal with the deaths that they have to deal with. So
what what Border Patrol has done is they have created a division to try to
rescue whatever migrants they can, and so it's it's it's strange because it kind
of creates a policy that's a little bit in conflict with itself. It's almost
like the right hand strikes and left hand saves because a lot of the people
who are immortal jeopardy, the migrants are because it's because of the border patrol's
tactics. You know, they've been intercepted and they've scattered and they've gotten lost,
and so then the other this other division that's tries to say them.
But that's an example of the fact that some of these agents are actually coped
having trouble coping with their job, which to me is kind of a red
flag that maybe something's really gone wrong with the way that we're administering our border.
What challenges were there to making this film? I can imagine there are
immense sort of just I mean on emotional level, I can imagine how challenging
it was. But is there anything else? You know? What was were
the roadblocks that came up as you tried to document this? There were,
I mean the first one that jumps to mind is the terrain itself. I
mean, it was challenging for a filming environment. You know, we had
our equipment often melted down, and then at work and it's we sometimes had
to take just the absolute minimum we could pass because we had to carry water.
The rest of it was water we hadn't carry. Um there's ratle snakes,
there was no I remember one day asking the sheriff's deputy we were out
on a ranch with in the middle of nowhere, if we get bit by
ral snake, where who has the anti venom? Where do we go?
And he just laughed. He said, there's no anti venom. Itelferious.
You got to get on a helicopter. So it was a little it was
a little daunting we had. We did have our footage threatened at one point
by the Department of Homeland Security. They were actually pretty good to us overall,
but we were We were under the auspices of the Border Patrol most of
the time when we were filming that footage with those agents, but a couple
of times it just it was like a logistical thing. They couldn't approve us
for that day, so we went with a justice of the peace, which
we can do. That's legal too. And when that happened, they didn't
like it and they got bad. But I would say that the hardest part
of all was just the emotional part of seeing all of that death and suffering,
and for me, I think the hardest part as we had a rule
with the film we would not show a deceased person who could be identified or
had been identified without getting the family's approval to do so. And there is
one individual one in the film. I don't want say too much about,
you know, the turn of events, but I had to show the footage
of his discovery to his father, and you know, as someone who has
a child, it's just something you can't help put yourself in that place and
seeing your child alone against a tree, it's very difficult. Oh my gosh,
being you in that situation sense horrible, and that sounds like a life
changing experience. Really, I want to ask why you think it is that
these stories get lost in the conversation about immigration so often. It's such a
surprising the degree to which people are unaware, and through no fault of their
own. I think it's probably the faults of those of us in the media
for not elevating these stories and making them so central to the conversation. But
why do you haven't having been on the ground it put so much after four
years, like you say, into telling this story. Why do you think
it is they so often get lost. The number of deaths that we use
in the film is twenty thousand since the advent of prevention through deterrence in nineteen
ninety four. That is a very conservative figure. I mean, there are
some groups that put the number closer to eighty thousand. The problem is that
it's very it's a very hard account to do because estimates are the vast majority
are never found. Because of these some of these ranches are bigger than the
state of World Island. I mean, they're massive. I think if this
death toll on American soil were the result of a dramatic event, like a
genocide or war, we could not ignore it. But migration is quiet.
It's invisible people, the unlucky people. They walk into the desert and they
vanish, And I think it's really hard to create a sense of urgency around
that that would create the political will to tackle it. And certainly it doesn't
really grab your attention in the media. It's it's kind of a silent mass
disaster. Yeah, you know, the media has this famous and tragic saying,
if it bleeds, it leads, But in this case, it's it's
almost because it doesn't From my perspective. It doesn't fit either side's narrative perfectly
about the problem at hand. It's it's just it doesn't advance either policy side
perfectly. There's there's so much nuance. I guess I wonder if as you
were undertaking this project, there was anything that you felt you learned that challenged
what you thought going into it, or that maybe changed your mind on something.
Yeah, well, the whole thing was eye opening. Like I said,
I didn't even know we had interior immigration checkpoints where they can stop every
car with no reasonable they can send you to secondary, hold up for another
twenty minutes, just just because So that was an eye opener that we have
that I didn't really understand how that could be compatible with the Fourth Amendment.
I had to throw a little digging into that. I think also when I
talked to Eddie Canalis about and again this is not something that's in the film,
but Eddie Canalis, who runs to South Texas huit rsor he's the guy
you see putting the walk are out, you know, for people who might
need it. He likes to talk about regularizing migration. That's what that's the
word he uses. He says, Look, you know we've got ten million
open jobs. We're not letting very many people come in to work. Instead,
we're playing this catch me if you can in the brush. And he
said, that's just you know, it's it's tragic, you know. And
and he distinguishes between the smugglers that are bringing people over, who are often
gang members, cartel members, are bringing drugs and stuff like that, and
the migrants who are basically just coming to join the labor force, and often
they already have a friend or a family member who's here. He makes a
big distinction between those two. And so his idea is, look, if
you regularize migration and bring people in in a safe and orderly way, but
keep track of them, do background checks, then it would reduce the traffic
of clandestine crossings between ports of entry to mostly the people that border patrol really
wants to catch. It would make their job a lot easier, like win,
win win, And I had never understood all the complexities of that until
we got into this film. And then of course the other one. I
don't want to I'll just mention it is the complexities of the part on Kate's
Bradley's side, I mean, that is diabolical in its complexity with her trying
to identify the deceased the exhumed remains through DNA by making matches and databases,
and all the challenges that she faces. I mean that she said herself,
it took her over two years to even really wrap her head around how that
system works or really doesn't work. This might be a little bit of a
pivot, but I'm always curious and I love asking professional documentarians about the current
documentary boom that it feels like we're in. Obviously, PBSS has been very
good about acquiring, distributing making documentaries. But from your perspective, especially as
the streaming wave feels like it's cresting, although probably isn't. Um, what
is the What has changed, if anything major in you know that about the
task of making a documentary distributing a documentary now that it seems like everybody is
just constantly imbibing documentaries day in and day out. Yeah, I do think
a documentary is having a golden era right now. People are watching them.
Yeah, it's um um. I will just say that for me as an
independent filmmaker, one of the reasons that I started making documentaries is scripted filmmaking
can be prohibitively expensive, and sometimes you find yourself waiting for investor to make
decisions, and in that sense, you're kind of waiting for permission to do
work. One of the things and I teach, by the way, I
teach filmmaking at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. One of the things I
tell students is in documentary, if you have a camera and you know how
to turn it on, and you have an idea, you can just get
started and then somewhere along the way, when you have something to show,
you can cut together some scenes. Then you can maybe bring on partners that
can support what you're doing. But the budgets are lower, the stories can
be just as compelling. We use the same techniques storytelling and structuring for drama
and suspense. I think if somebody watches Missing New Brooks County, I think
they'll find it can be quite a suspenseful story. Yeah, but it's real.
And that's what's kind of electric and interesting about documentaries. I think today
and you'll see them, you know, you see them on the home page
Flix and Amazon. It's really something. Yeah. No, I agree.
Um, obviously we're talking in the midst of a major writers strike. W
g A just joined the strike AI. They're very very legitimate concerns about AI
and how it's affecting the industry. Is AI? Do you do you feel
that it's going to have a really serious, rapid effect on documentary filmmaking?
What are the Are there any risks there? I am not I'm not sure
that I am informed enough to see where AI is gonna impact documentary filmmaking.
I wouldn't be surprised. I think it's going to impact a lot of things.
I can definitely see where it's going to impact scripted filmmaking for sure.
I do think that it's always been up to the filmmakers in documentary to be
honest, you know, because AI allows you to do all kinds of things.
You can make somebody say things they didn't say, and you can even
do it on camera. Um, it's getting really sophisticated. So I think
we need let me, let me put in a plug for media literacy,
which I really believe in. I think we're going to need that more than
ever going forward. But it's it's really it's really up to the ethics of
the filmmaker, because you know, all film is a manipulation, but the
question is is it a manipulation in service as a truth or is it a
manipulation that undermines the truth? And AI can be a tool that could be
used, you know, responsibly or irresponsibly. Right, No, absolutely,
Um, Before I let you run, could you tell us us a little
bit about the reception that you've gotten to Missing and Brooks County. It's it's
been out for a while. Um, Like we mentioned just one of Peabody,
so big congratulations on that. Um. We've been surprised by how people
have received it. Um, you know, how how it's made them think
differently. Um, what are you hearing from people after they see it?
Any of that? Most people are glad that they saw it. Uh,
it is you know, it's it's often maybe it's not everybody's idea of what
they want to watch on a Saturday night, but we have had a great
response to it. It played on Independent Lens and it came back from Awards
window is still available everywhere. You can watch it at you know, Amazon
or Google Play or wherever you like, Apple, wherever you like to get
your films. It won a Peabody, which we were just so thrilled about
because anything that puts this the subject on people's radar. We think is a
win, and I think it was very courageous for the Peabody jury to recognize
this film. It's a it's a story that is it's tough, and I
think it's easy to look past, but they didn't do that. So we
took the film. When I say we, me and Lisa Malamut, my
co director, and Jacob Brica, i was one of our code producers and
the editor of the film, with two of the film's participants, Eddie and
Kate, and we went to Washington, DC. We showed the film,
We had briefings with Democrats, with Republicans, we had a screening there and
it was I mean, we'll see. You know, we're not activists working
on this topic. We know those people, but this film is a tool
for them if they want to use it to explain in an emotional way what's
happening and kind of take people there. Because of the verity filmmaking something you
can do that. Let's just say that if a lawmaker goes home on a
weekend with a three thousand page policy paper and an eighty one minute film or
DVD, they're probably gonna they're probably going to pick up the film first.
They're staff too, staff for sure, the gen Z staffers on Capitol Hell.
Yes, well, Jeff b miss, thank you so much for coming
out and talk a little bit about Missing in Brooks County. Where can people
stream the film if they want to watch it? It's on Apple, TV,
Amazon, It's on YouTube, I don't know. It's all the Google
play all pretty much all of them. It's not on Netflix, but it's
everywhere else. Great and yeah, I recommend people check it out. It's
very, very compelling. So Jeff, thank you once again for your time.
We really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you. Emily,
you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more.
Until then, the lovers of freedom and anxious for the fras all right,