'The Trade' Season 2 Episode 4: Uncertain futures of asylum seekers under Trump administration strike a chord
The last episode of 'The Trade' Season 2, like its first one, has its faults. But in its last few minutes, it conveys the difficulty asylum seekers face under the current administration. As it summarizes the fate that awaits Magda, Rossni, Pastor Danny and others featured in the docu-series, it tells us that each is waiting for their asylum request to be granted.
Only Sochil, her husband and child have been given asylum for their help in arresting La Luz Del Mundo Church's pedophile "Apostle" Naason Joaquin Garcia and several co-conspirators in the US after the case in the Mexican court falls apart and they have to flee when the church's men come looking for Sochil's daughter in school. The only other feel-good moment is a shot of Magda, with her newborn daughter, who becomes a US citizen as soon as she is born.
We also see one case affected by the Trump administration's stricter immigrant policy in which Juana, a grandmother with six kids, faces deportation after living 20 years in the US. She queries her lawyer, tears spilling out, "did they read everything in the packet? Did they review it properly?" When her son says they could appeal to the president, she scoffs quietly.
Over the course of the last three episodes, filmmaker Matthew Heineman showed how human trafficking is a billion-dollar industry made on the backs of vulnerable migrants fleeing violence and certain death in their home countries. A poignant quote comes from Juana's son as he is driving her to Mexico for "self-deportation" instead of waiting for ICE to arrest her after her plea for clemency is rejected.
He says: "we migrants leave our homes because we have no hope and no chance of justice in our countries. Sometimes, we are well-received but other times we are forced to sneak in, to hide in the shadows, to make ourselves small. Billions of dollars are made off of migrants. They smuggle us, traffick us, exploit us. They work us, imprison us and many times, they deport us."
With stricter laws at the border that turns away more and more legitimate asylum seekers, this "trade" in migrants will only become more lucrative. Simultaneously, the risks these migrants will take to cross over will increase manifold. Risks that will leave them even more vulnerable to coyotes, gangs, and cartels who make money off them (when they can) or kill and rape them (when they can't). It is a cycle of misery that is endless.
In the last three episodes, we saw Pastor Danny in Honduras crossing gang lines to make appeals for peace, trying to broker truces and a cessation of hostilities. In the blood-splattered neighborhoods where gang violence holds sway, he is the only voice of sanity. He is also the only one whom ordinary people, caught in the crossfire, can approach. As one harried householder tells him, "we don't know what we'd do without you."
In Episode 4, we see him broker peace by talking to "The Ogre", the MS-13 gang's captain in his parish territory. When the Ogre is killed for agreeing to the truce, Pastor Danny fears for his own life since he is the one who brokered the truce.
In the end, we see him as an asylum seeker in the US as well, unable to continue enabling peace over violence in his homeland. Heineman's docu-series provides no easy answers. He just lets you know that the lives of the migrants that he has captured on film, and of others like them, will get even worse in the years to come.
Heineman doesn't even get into how, by October 2019, 5,400 children were separated from their parents seeking asylum since July 2017. But even without that horrifying statistic, it is clear that the cartel and gangs' hold over migrants and their trafficking will only increase as legitimate means of gaining US citizenship are shut down.
'The Trade' Season 2 Episode 4 aired on March 27 at 9/8c on Showtime.