01
THE FILM
FROM ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE
ROBERT BILHEIMER
A Film for All Americans
When They Come for Me is 20-minute documentary film that puts a human face on the realities of immigration policies in America today by telling stories about the immigrants themselves: children, women, and men for whom the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America has become nothing more than a cruel and ironic joke.
Masterminded at the highest levels of the U.S. government, current immigration policies in America are not, as they are purported to be, targeted only to “the worst of the worst”-- criminals and malfeasants accountable to the laws of the land. Rather, they are a relentless, random, and illegal purging of innocent citizens and immigrants whose only crime is to have skin that is not white.
This is Happening Now
In the past year, for instance, Americans have witnessed, in their own communities and neighborhoods, horrors and scenarios reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Heavily armed men in masks using children as bait, separating mother and child, father and son, husband and wife. Overnight deportations, often to countries with records of cruelty to “alien” deportees. Racial profiling. Unlawful and violent break-ins and arrests. Entrapment at court dates. Incarceration in filthy, overcrowded detention facilities.
Physical violence, committed with blanket impunity, against old men, pregnant women, individuals in the final stages of terminal illness, priests, children, infants, and the physically and mentally impaired.
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Photo: Carol Guzy
Photo: GETTY Images
Photo: Carol Guzy
02
THE FACTS
By the Numbers
By the principles and standards of American democracy, even a single instance or event as described above would be cause for outrage and alarm.
But in July, 2026 alone, ICE agents, working with more than 2,400 direct mandates nationwide to enlist local law enforcement, arrested an estimated 50,000 people. That’s one person every 54 seconds, or 1,600 a day.
These arrests, and the detainments and deportations that often follow them, are being done quietly, often under the cover of a traffic stop or visit to a federal courthouse. The premise of this approach is that “official” full-blown raids would attract media attention, along with the attention of the American public, an outcome to be avoided at all costs.
Another unconscionable number is that through the first nine months of 2026, more than 145,000 children have been separated from their detained parents– or detained themselves. Approximately one third of these children are under the age of six.
One recent headline in a national newspaper describes the astonishing implication of this reality for hundreds of thousands of America’s young people:
“Kids’ Trauma of ICE Detainment May Last Lifetimes”
The Normalization of Brutality
The dangerous and disgraceful abuses that allow such numbers to be recorded are alarming in and of themselves. But there is an even greater danger afoot: namely the embedding of inhuman immigration policies into the ebbs and flows of daily American life.
This gradual but relentless subsuming of evil into American culture is to be expected given the sophistication of those manipulating US immigration policy at the present time. The government knows that eventually the news cycle will change; it knows that public attention and concern can be fickle and short-lived; it knows that it can– “with impunity”, as Steven Miller says– disenfranchise a vulnerable immigrant population that cannot, out of a deep and paralyzing fear, speak for itself.
03
THE FUTURE
HOPE IS ALIVE
What the government does not seem to know, however, is that it is playing with the flickering flame of an angry American public that feels more and more betrayed by an administration that does nothing but lie.
It is to this public that When They Come for Me speaks. The film’s national distribution campaign includes grassroots organizations; social justice and human rights groups; faith-based organizations; universities and colleges; commercial and public broadcasters; on-line streaming; social media platforms; in-flight entertainment; podcasts; film festivals; community and theatrical screenings; and local, regional, and national school districts.
As the historian Heather Cox Richardson points out, this kind of broad demographic, in a country of 340 million people, “carries a lot of weight….”
… you might feel like you’re only one person and there’s not a lot you can do. But you can find a friend, find two more friends, and pretty soon you’ve got a base group of one hundred or two hundred people who can get together and turn a community around. That’s how you create change. And it’s working!
“Working” is the operative word here: both in terms of what the American people are doing, and in terms of what still needs to be done. In this sense, When They Come for Me is very much a “working” film: a call to action, a cry for help, and a vision of better times to come.
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Photo: Carol Guzy
“Thanks to you and your team for continuing to move this important work forward. Nothing can assist in changing the hearts of people like the true images and stories of those who are impacted by the heartless policies we are seeing unfold in these difficult days.”
BISHOP MARK SEITZ, CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF
EL PASO, TEXAS