The Gephardt Institute hosted a screening of Borderland: The Line Within, a documentary about the struggles of immigrants in the U.S. on Feb. 20.

Pi Sigma Alpha, the Political Science Honors Society, and Alpha Psi Lambda, the Co-ed Latiné fraternity, led the event, which was followed by a Zoom Q&A session with the directors of the film. The event was hosted as part of WashU’s Civic Action Week, which highlights civic engagement opportunities throughout campus.

Before the screening of Borderland, Paco de Onís and Pamela Yates, producer and director respectively, spoke on the significance of the film in relation to the political culture surrounding immigrants in the U.S. 

“Right now, we’re living in a very tough time. Our communities are under threat, immigrants that we know and work with are scared,” Yates said. “I think it’s really important in making these kinds of documentaries … to find people who are showing the way forward. Those are the people you are going to meet in this film.”

Borderland, released in 2024, highlights narratives of Latinx immigrants navigating the 2016 Trump administration’s immigration policies, the impact of COVID-19 on their migration and residence in the U.S., and their civic engagement with organizations like the Poor People’s Campaign and the International Mayan League.

“We tried to introduce people watching the film to a wide variety of ways that they can participate in being a force for good in immigration rights and human rights in the United States,” Yates said.

In the Q&A session, the filmmakers answered student attendees’ questions on their narrative selection process, challenges faced over the five-year long filmmaking process, and anti-immigrant rhetoric among the Latinx community.

“I wanted to counter the narrative that we see most often in the mainstream media, which is that immigrants are victims, that immigrants are powerless, because in actuality, they have a lot of agency,” Yates said, when asked about narrative selection. “They have leadership [skills], [they’re] educated. They educate each other. They have important strategies for solidarity to strengthen their communities.” 

The stories of the protagonists of the film, Gabriela Castañeda and Kaxh Mura’l, were central to the film. Each played a key role in advocating for their communities at both the national and local level in the U.S.

Yates said that the human-centered narrative of this film is important to interweave into the overarching subject of Borderland, which is the Border Industrial Complex.

“The very personal stories that have a very strong sense of journey can intersect with [the] overarching theme of the Border-Industrial Complex, and the amounts of money that are being spent and who’s profiting from it, and how interconnected this Border Industrial-Complex is,” Yates said.

A student attendee asked the filmmakers about Latino border patrol agents who have “anti-immigrant views within immigrant communities.” According to de Onís, employment within the U.S. Customs and Border Protection is often attractive to Latinos because of its financial security and benefits.

“What we’re trying to tackle is not the agent, but [it] is the system,” Castañeda says in the film.

When asked about what they’d like their audience to take away from the film, the filmmakers said they hoped to make people reflect on their own ability to engage in civic action. 

“We all have leadership qualities. We may not think of ourselves that way, but we do,” Yates said. All of us who are here right now, we’re in an incredibly privileged position.”

De Onís said that getting in touch with relevant local Congress representatives and putting public pressure on them to alter the immigration system are ways to get involved. He also said that it is important to fight stereotypes, whenever they come up.

“We really need to push back against [the narrative of undesirable criminals] in every way we can,” de Onís said. “Locally, in conversations with people, with friends, Congress [representatives], wherever it comes up.”

De Onís and Yates invited the WashU community to join a Zoom webinar they will be hosting on March 31 at 7 p.m. Eastern time to participate in conversations on immigration with immigrant activists and leaders. They said that the two-hour rally will be a space for solidarity and to share experiences related to immigration.

After the screening, President of Pi Sigma Alpha and junior Ambar De Santos told Student Life about the importance of hosting events that foster dialogue on immigrant rights. She pointed to ICE agent sightings in the St. Louis area as an example of the urgency surrounding immigration issues in our community.

“The concept of immigration at WashU isn’t talked about, and I wish it was, and I’m trying to change that this year,” she said.

Junior and Alpha Psi Lambda member Lorena Alvarez attended the screening and said she noticed a disparity in the diversity of attendees.

“The turnout was a lot of people that I already knew, and so I feel like that kind of reflects who is already showing up in these spaces that support this community,” Alvarez said. “It’s kind of hard to get somebody to come here if they don’t already have a connection to the community.”

External Vice President of Alpha Psi Lambda, junior Samira Saleh, said that it was nerve wracking to host the event given pressure from the Trump administration on colleges to end DEI initiatives and programs. She celebrated WashU’s ability to provide spaces for “unfiltered” dialogue and discussion that encourage students to be honest, and hopes that the screening and dialogue with directors highlighted the reality of immigrants in the U.S.

“These are the types of experiences that we see in this exposé documentary that are real. This is someone’s reality, that as we speak, they’re going through,” Saleh said. “This is not just something we’re learning in a class that we’re getting credit for to graduate, this is real s—.”

De Santos concluded the event with words of courage for those anxious about the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“More than ever we have seen this administration’s efforts to silence us, to degrade us,” De Santos said. “But we’re gonna move forward from that and we’re going to be bigger than that. We’ll get through this together.”