“One year ago I was reading Kafka, now I’m living it,” says Marco Saavedra, regarding his experience inside Florida’s Broward Transitional Center for immigrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Unlike his fellow prisoners, Saavedra’s detention has been orchestrated by the National Immigration Youth Alliance in order to infiltrate the facility. Later, another member of the group, Viridiana Martinez, is also strategically imprisoned to cover the wing assigned to women.

The organization is comprised of primarily young undocumented activists who were raised in America. Their purpose is to protest against low-priority deportations, question unfair immigration policies, and create media noise to stop deportations. (In their public demonstrations, they chant: “No papers, no fear”).

The leader of the organization is Mohammad Abdollahi, a young, gay Iranian who arrived in the United States with his parents when he was three years old. In a TV interview, he declares that returning to Iran would represent a death sentence because of his sexuality. To the same extent, his colleagues have similar experiences: they come from countries that they never really knew and their lives could be at risk if they go back to the impoverished and dangerous countries they left behind.

In the detention centers, Saavedra and Martinez establish direct contact with other detainees in danger of deportation. If they succeed in transforming these cases into stories of human interest for the media, they hope to exercise enough pressure to avoid deportation. One of their difficulties is to smuggle in legal documents for inmates to sign, granting permission to make their cases public.

If this were a fiction film, it would have elements of political drama, a heist movie starring con artists, and a juicy prison break story line. However, The Infiltrators is the real deal, a documentary based on actual facts with chronological descriptions of the events narrated by those who have lived to tell it. At the same time, these stories are interpolated with reenactments with actors.

The film was directed by the married filmmakers Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, who combine their particular experiences in documentaries and fiction to assemble this surprising alchemy of docudrama and thriller. The reenactments are treated with the same care and importance as the real-life footage and testimonies. The directors manage the mixture with a strong narrative pulse.

One of the great merits of the documentary lies in its depiction of the system behind the detention and deportation of immigrants as an arbitrary and absurd process without falling into an alienating caricature of power and oppression. Broward Transitional Center is portrayed as an aseptic and dreary place, not particularly evil though menacing enough, and a labyrinth of bureaucracy that really earns the term Kafkaesque. Detainees can use the phones anytime, and some of the detained can work for a dollar per day according to their abilities (sad as that sounds) and have the privilege of seeing visitors (something that Saavedra uses to his favor). Someone jokes that even here immigrants keep doing the hard work.

Although Saavedra and Martinez are charming narrators, the individual profiles of the migrants they befriend provide the film’s heart. They are men and women who have names, stories, and a paused life walled behind a system whose greater cruelty is its indifference. Among them: an Argentinian expecting to reunited with his family (they lost their house after the father’s detention), an asylum seeking Venezuelan woman who was a former flight attendant on the presidential plane during the Hugo Chávez regime, and a Congolese woman arrested after denouncing the American husband who beat her.

The Infiltrators is fully committed to its cause, alongside their protagonists, while presenting the immigration problem under an optic free of partisanship. For many, one major surprise would be to find out these events happened in a pre-Trump America. His name and anti-immigration postures are never mentioned, though perceived as a distressing shadow on any small victory achieved by the National Immigration Youth Alliance. What remains, in any case, is an inspirational example of individuals who have the bravery of dreaming of freedom and fighting to achieve it, which is a very American theme, with or without the papers to support it.