Laura Poitras’s “They’re Here” Documents 2025 ICE Sweep in Minneapolis

The 25-minute documentary “They’re Here,” co-directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Rachel Lauren Mueller, premiered out-of-competition at the Venice Film Festival on September 7. The film follows volunteer networks in Minneapolis as they track Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during a large-scale deportation operation carried out earlier in 2025. It intercuts footage of masked ICE officers, community volunteers mapping vehicle movements, and a Mexican man hiding with his son.

The Straits Times

President Donald Trump launched a nationwide deportation drive immediately after taking office in January 2025, defending ICE’s tactics and asserting that people who entered the United States illegally must be sent home. The Minneapolis sweep sparked weeks of protests; ICE officers shot dead two U.S. citizens during confrontations. The operation became a flashpoint in the broader campaign, prompting the administration to scale back the effort after sustained unrest.

The Straits Times

• Poitras said ICE later removed 80 percent of its agents following the community resistance.

Hollywood Reporter

• ICE’s annual budget is reported at $70 billion.

Hollywood Reporter

• In the “last two months” of the operation, 90,000 people were abducted, a record high for June and July.

Hollywood Reporter

All figures are presented as Poitras’s statements about the documentary’s content.

Hollywood Reporter

Poitras told a Venice press conference that the film aims to “denormalise” the violence she described as a national nightmare. Mueller emphasized that the resistance was primarily documentary in nature, focused on keeping people safe rather than confronting ICE directly. Poitras added that the film emerged from solidarity with immigrant neighbors and that the scale of the response—tens to hundreds of thousands of residents—offers “hope.” Mueller noted that over two Trump terms, the public has become accustomed to increasingly extreme enforcement tactics.

The Straits Times

• “The reality is a nightmare. The entire country is under attack and immigrants are living in fear throughout the United States right now,” — Laura Poitras

The Straits Times

• “In the mainstream media, this kind of violence is being normalised. We believe very strongly in the power of cinema to denormalise this violence and to show what's happening,” — Laura Poitras

The Straits Times

• “We were using the genres or language of dystopian cinema or horror to take us closer to reality, not to take us further away, and not to make fiction from reality,” — Laura Poitras

Hollywood Reporter

• “So I think the real role of this film is to shake that up a bit — to change things from a space of intellectualization about these numbers and these images that we see, and to have it become more visceral again.” — Laura Poitras

Hollywood Reporter