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LeBlanc’s wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander) personifies the American public’s loss of innocence over the past decade about the harsh realities of the U.S. immigration system.
There are no happy endings in Blue Bayou, and that’s the point. The breakout indie film from Korean American director Justin Chon begins with the despondency of a down-on-his-luck tattoo artist struggling to make ends meet in New Orleans and closes with jarring images of him being torn from the arms of his family by nameless immigration agents. A dark tale, but also a quintessentially American one, bringing to the big screen for the first time the tragedies at the heart of an immigration system dead set on mass deportation for more than a decade.
Blue Bayou is the story of Antonio LeBlanc (played by Chon himself), a Korean-born adoptee brought to Louisiana as a baby and abandoned soon after to the local foster care system. A rough upbringing and criminal past loom large over LeBlanc, whose efforts to get back on the straight and narrow are cut short by an untimely run-in with a bigoted police officer. LeBlanc’s seven-year-old stepdaughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske) and his pregnant wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander) can do little more than scream as they watch him being beaten and handcuffed in the middle of a grocery store. The scene ends with a bruised LeBlanc staring out from the back of a squad car as it drives away. Kathy rushes to bail him out of the local jail, only to find he’s no longer there. Agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took him. He was to be deported.
Blue Bayou is cause for both tears and celebration. The doomed struggle of LeBlanc against ICE is exactly the kind of story that immigrant activists have told anyone who’d listen since the agency was founded in 2003. But it wasn’t until the election of President Donald Trump and his administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants that such narratives began to creep into popular culture. In Blue Bayou, which had a limited release last month in more than 470 theaters across the country, we see ICE through the eyes of an undocumented immigrant and his family. We see the agency portrayed as a villain. That’s no small thing.
“If you’d told me 15 years ago that this movie was coming out, I would’ve expected it to have been a sensationalist film glorifying ICE as an agency at the front line of the war on terror, led by some fictional crime fighter like Jack Bauer or Jack Ryan,” says César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University and author of two books on the intersection between criminal law and immigration. “There’s something fitting about this kind of critical attention being brought to the agency as it approaches its 20th anniversary.”
The threat of deportation at the hands of ICE hangs over every scene following LeBlanc’s arrest, though ICE agents themselves make relatively few appearances throughout the movie. The oddest appearance comes in the form of one of LeBlanc’s own friends, Merk (Toby Vitrano), whom we first meet as he gets a tattoo from LeBlanc. “We got a lot of bad people in this country,” Merk tells Jessie. “My job is to kick them out.” A few scenes later, on their drive home, LeBlanc and Jessie come across Merk rounding up a group of nameless Latino men standing with their hands behind their heads.
Merk’s conception of the righteousness of his work and the badness of immigrants is tested upon hearing of LeBlanc’s pending deportation. That dynamic—of liking some immigrants while assuming the criminality of others—has long been the norm in U.S. society and much of popular media.
“For the American public, when it comes to immigration, there’s this undercurrent of legality and whether or not a person is here legally, which makes it ten times more difficult to get them to change their attitudes on immigration,” says Ali Noorani, president of the National Immigration Forum advocacy group. “People come to love the Maria or Mohammed they know but are still leery of the Maria or Mohammed they’ve never met. That’s why these kinds of stories are so important.”
In the end, Merk vouches for LeBlanc’s character before an immigration judge, and when that fails, even goes so far as to tell LeBlanc that he’ll allow him to escape to avoid being deported. The inclusion of a likable ICE character is a perplexing creative choice by Chon, one that leaves the viewer without a personal target for their anger. Nonetheless, the message we’re left with is that ICE’s evils are far greater than the sum of its parts. Merk tries, and fails, to fight the system from within, just as many civil servants did at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, under the Trump administration.
The doomed struggle of LeBlanc against ICE is exactly the kind of story that immigrant activists have told anyone who’d listen since the agency was founded in 2003.
Merk may have been shocked by the news of his close friend being undocumented, but it’s LeBlanc’s wife, Kathy, who’s the most devastated by the news of the deportation proceedings. She learns that, through a legal quirk, LeBlanc never received citizenship upon arriving from Korea and his adopted parents failed to formalize his legal status. According to the attorney they hire to help with LeBlanc’s case, DHS has been “using loopholes” to target people like LeBlanc for years.
The injustice of LeBlanc being deported to a country he hardly knows for reasons beyond his control leaves Kathy distraught. “It’s not his fault,” she pleads with the attorney before pointing out LeBlanc’s thick Cajun accent. “Listen to him [talk]. He’s American.”
Kathy personifies the American public’s loss of innocence over the past decade about the harsh realities of the U.S. immigration system, particularly under the Trump administration. For some, it was the Muslim ban. For others, it wasn’t until the release of images and videos capturing the horrific conditions facing migrant children at the border that the true depravity of the Trump administration’s policies became clear. This despite the many years of work by activists to bring attention to abuses by ICE and Customs and Border Protection under both Trump and President Barack Obama before him.
LeBlanc’s own story is not too dissimilar from that of the estimated 3.6 million Dreamers who were brought illegally to this country as children and have spent the rest of their lives under the shadow of deportation. It took years of concerted activism before the Obama administration created deportation protections for Dreamers through DACA. And even then, those lucky enough to qualify for the program remain in limbo. Trump tried to end DACA through executive action for years, stopped by the courts on procedural technicalities. Under President Joe Biden, those roles reversed, and it was a federal court that ruled DACA illegal and blocked any further applicants from being accepted. The Biden administration is reportedly working on a procedural fix to reinstate the program—but do Americans care as much as they used to now that Trump is gone?
“Most white progressives and liberals didn’t really pay attention until Trump came along. That’s when you saw massive protests,” says Noorani. “They started to see immigration and the way Trump treated immigrants as an animating issue. Now that Trump’s gone, immigration has fallen on their list of priorities.”
As in Blue Bayou, the country now has no one villain to cast blame on. Biden has reversed dozens of the Trump administration’s immigration policies but has continued others, while receiving far less scrutiny than Trump did. One week after Blue Bayou hit theaters, the Biden administration announced plans to deport thousands of Haitians seeking asylum at the southern border with Mexico—the same migrants who’d been whipped and rounded up like cattle by immigration agents just days before. These deportations are being carried out under Title 42—the very same provision used by Trump to deport immigrants at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Take Trump out of the equation, however, and there isn’t nearly as much uproar.
A world where many of the Trump administration’s immigration abuses go on without much controversy isn’t inconceivable to Hernández.
“That was the world under President Obama. That’s the world in which DHS deported more people than during any other time in the history of this country, including under Trump,” says Hernández. “It’s not a world that’s hard to imagine—it’s where we lived not that long ago.”
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LeBlanc’s (Justin Chon) story is not dissimilar from that of the estimated 3.6 million Dreamers who were brought illegally to this country as children and have spent their lives under the shadow of deportation.
Any prospects of legislative immigration reform under Biden are slim. The Democratic-controlled Congress has failed several times in its legislative efforts and, most recently, had their plan to include a provision offering permanent residency for millions of immigrants in a budget reconciliation bill rejected by the Senate parliamentarian. (Technically, Democrats could override the parliamentarian’s decision with support from the entire Senate caucus, but that’s unlikely given how much the party has already struggled to gain full support for the reconciliation package as is.)
Biden himself has used next to no political capital to advance proposed immigration reform measures, nor has he touted his administration’s role in undoing several Trump-era restrictions. A sustained jump in the number of migrants arriving at the border turned the president and other Democrats sheepish on immigration, operating on the assumption that immigration is a losing issue right now.
But if the left has decided to cede control of the narrative around immigration, the right has been more than happy to take over. State and congressional Republicans seized upon the “border crisis” soon after Biden’s election. Using the Trump playbook, the GOP has blamed migrants at the border for surges in COVID-19 cases in Southern states and frequently invokes the image of an “invasion” of immigrants at the country’s doorstep.
“Immigration has never been the priority for progressives. Contrast that with conservatives, who are very passionate about immigration. They’ve worked for decades to build a narrative around it,” says Define American founder Jose Antonio Vargas. “The election of Trump is a signal of just how effective that anti-immigrant narrative has been … We need to form a narrative that’s just as strong on the left.”
Define American is a nonprofit group that consults with content producers to ensure accurate depictions of immigrants in the stories they tell. Since its creation in 2016, the nonprofit has worked on a total of 100 movies and TV shows, including Grey’s Anatomy and NBC’s Superstore. Vargas was surprised by the immediate demand, not just for stories featuring immigrant characters, but also for those told from the viewpoint of immigrant characters.
Through this work, Vargas, who is undocumented himself, has developed a theory of change for immigration that puts cultural victories first and political solutions second.
“Think of the LGBTQ movement and the role that TV shows like Will & Grace played in it. That was the top show in the country and it preceded all the LGBTQ reforms we’ve seen in the past 20 years,” says Vargas. “This is something the immigrant rights movement is beginning to understand. Activists are turning more and more to popular culture to tell their stories.”
Last year, Define American worked with USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project to conduct a study of immigrant representation in 59 scripted TV shows, including such hits as Orange Is the New Black and Madam Secretary. The study found marked improvement in overall representation as well as a lingering overemphasis on criminal backgrounds for immigrant characters. Still, the evidence suggests a move in the right direction, toward which cultural breakthroughs like Blue Bayou mark a huge step. The question now is whether these trends will continue.
“Building a narrative is long-term work,” says Vargas. “Blue Bayou is great, but there needs to be many more like it if it’s going to lead to lasting change.”
In that sense, Blue Bayou ultimately represents a bittersweet victory for the immigrant rights movement. Its existence is a testament to the constant struggle of activists to lift up enforcement abuses, but also a sober reminder that these abuses continue all over the country. In the end, of course, it’s just one film.
Blue Bayou closes with LeBlanc torn from the arms of his crying family, and the credits hit so quickly that audience members have little time to stifle their own tears. Regardless of the state of immigration politics, the stories of immigrants still hold real power. Chon’s gutting deportation drama is the first of its kind to go mainstream, and hopefully not the last.
