Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras presented They’re Here, documenting ICE raids in Minneapolis and the protests against them.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras presented They’re Here at the Venice Film Festival on Monday, a short documentary revisiting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Minneapolis and the protests that followed, including the deaths of two U.S. citizens.
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Directed by Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller, the documentary premiered out of competition as Poitras said migrants in the United States are living with fear amid what she described as an escalating climate of violence.
“The reality is a nightmare: the entire country is under attack, and immigrants are living in fear in the United States right now,” Poitras told reporters at a news conference for the film.
They’re Here draws on footage recorded during protests against ICE operations in Minneapolis, where the agency deployed forces between December 2025 and February. Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens, died during protests against the deployment.
Thousands of people were arrested during the demonstrations. By mid-February, the Trump administration had withdrawn 80% of the ICE forces deployed in the city following opposition from local residents.
The documentary also features the testimony of Edén Villa, a migrant who speaks in Spanish under a pseudonym about living with the fear of arrest and deportation.
“We firmly believe in the power of cinema to challenge the normalization of this violence and show what is happening in a way that allows you to feel that sense of terror,” Poitras said. “That was always the approach we wanted to take, using elements of dystopian and horror cinema to confront reality, rather than distance ourselves from it or turn fiction into reality.”
Challenging the normalization of violence
Mueller said violence had become “truly normalized” in the United States. During Donald Trump’s two presidencies, from 2017 to 2021 and since 2025, she said, people had gradually become accustomed to increasingly extreme developments.
She said the documentary was intended to disrupt that normalization.
They’re Here states that ICE has a $70 billion budget and aims to reach one million deportations a year. Mueller called the figure “astronomical” and warned that the agency remained active despite changes in its tactics.
Poitras, who won the 2015 Academy Award for best documentary feature for Citizenfour, said the filmmakers did not need to do much to give ICE agents a menacing appearance.
“They were paramilitary forces that covered their faces to protect their identities and acted completely outside any limits, like an occupying force in an American city,” she said. “It’s not as if we had to work very hard to portray them as zombies or monsters.”
Poitras said the film sought both to acknowledge the success of citizen resistance in forcing the withdrawal of 80% of ICE forces from Minneapolis and to highlight that the agency still has “unlimited resources and, apparently, absolute impunity.”
“There is a long tradition of violence in the United States. It is not something exclusive to Trump, and yet what is happening represents an escalation and a threat to democracy that are undoubtedly difficult to comprehend,” she said.
Clooney warns against politics of fear
Also at the Venice festival, actor George Clooney used his acceptance speech for the festival’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement to warn against political appeals to fear and authoritarianism.
“The first people authoritarians try to silence are not politicians, but journalists who ask questions, artists who refuse to give easy answers, filmmakers, writers, actors and musicians who insist that someone you have never met deserves your empathy,” Clooney said.
He added that while films cannot solve the world’s practical problems, they can remind audiences that people share more in common than they are often led to believe.
Asked by international media about the state of U.S. politics, Clooney used the term “kakistocracy,” meaning government by the least qualified.
“I think perhaps we are living in a kakistocracy right now, but we will get through it,” he said.
Clooney also described the November elections as a “system of checks and balances” and said he hoped “some normality” would be restored by 2028.
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