(RNS) — In 2018, a group of Central American migrants, mostly from Honduras, traveled hundreds of miles through Mexico to the U.S. border, many fleeing gang death threats at home.

They became known as the migrant caravan, an obsession for then-President Donald Trump, who castigated the people as “lawless” and the caravan as an “invasion.”

Documentary filmmaker Cady Voge followed one Honduran family, a couple, Magdiel and Mirna (their full names are withheld for protection) and their young son, as they made their way from Mexico to Seattle, where they settled for three years until an immigration court heard their asylum claim. The couple fled Honduras because of the violence inflicted by narco traffickers. Magdiel’s father was brutally murdered; Mirna’s two brothers were also killed.

During their stay, Magdiel and Mirna were helped by a Seattle synagogue, Kol HaNeshama, which supported the family financially and with housing. Religious congregations have provided the scaffolding for many migrant families fleeing persecution, threatened with deportation or resettling in the U.S. as refugees.

Cady Voge. (Photo © Matias Castello)

Immigration has reemerged as a key issue in the 2024 presidential election, with Trump calling undocumented immigrants “prisoners, murders, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists.”

Voge’s 87-minute documentary, “All We Carry,” shows another side. The film won the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, last week. It is being shown at the Milwaukee Film Festival this weekend and will have additional screenings in Oakland, California, congregations in May. Congregations can request a screening at: [email protected]

Religion News Service caught up with Voge to ask her about the film. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Talk about about the opening scene of mounds of people sleeping on the roofs of moving cargo trains. How did you get there and what was it like?

I was living in Colombia in Latin America, working as a freelance journalist, and there had been at least a week or so of news about the migrant caravan. It became a pretty big story. President Trump started tweeting about it and the whole international press corps kind of descended upon this group of between 1,000 to 2,000 people, moving together for the purposes of safety in numbers from southern Mexico to northern Mexico. There were a lot of asylum-seekers among them and it’s largely organized, at that time, at least, by an organization called Pueblo Sin Fronteras. I had a source who was an organizer so I already had some inroads in that human rights organization. So I decided to travel to Mexico to cover the story. I thought, OK, now there’s a chance to go a little bit deeper, I’d like to do something a little slower, a little closer up and in a long-form format, one family’s story during this journey.

So I flew into Guadalajara, Mexico. The caravan of people rested for a few hours at a church. Most of the shelters along the migrant corridor were Catholic churches. The train is infamously called La Bestia or The Beast because of how dangerous it is. And it’s a really popular way to travel through Mexico for migrants for a couple of reasons. It’s free and it’s fast. And it’s a way to not be intercepted by Immigration for people who are fleeing violence but might not have authorization to be in Mexico.

How did you find the family you featured?

So I met up with the caravan at a Catholic church in Guadalajara before they kept moving north. And then because there had been a fair amount of media coverage, there were enough donations to hire a few buses for women and children and people that were sick. The assignment I was working on was to follow the story of a family, so while we were all walking to the train, I chatted with this mother and two daughters. And I thought it’d be interesting to follow their story because there are not as many women because it is so dangerous for women traveling alone. But then they got a spot on the bus, so I no longer had subjects for my story. And I knew I wanted to visually capture that unique experience of being on the train. I was talking to a colleague, trying to figure out what to do, when a young man came up just to chat while we were all waiting for the train. I told him I was a little nervous to get on the train and asked him if he’d done it before. He said, yes, and I asked if he was nervous. And he said, “No, because I always go with God.” And then I found out his wife and baby had gotten a spot on the bus, and since my assignment was specifically to follow a family’s journey, I asked him if I could follow his story, and he said “yes.” That young man was Magdiel, who ends up being the protagonist of the film.

Ultimately they get to Tijuana where they’re reunited and then separated again. What was that like?

“All We Carry” film poster. (Courtesy image)

The process of seeking asylum is that you reach the U.S. border immigration and explain that you’re afraid to return home and you ask for asylum. This is what the family in the film did, and then they were processed for a few days, and stayed in a holding cell that’s run by Customs and Border Protection that are separated into separate areas for men and women.

And then some days later, it was deemed that Magdiel’s fear of returning was credible enough to send him on to the next step, which is to be held in ICE detention. Same with Mirna, and she and their baby were sent to a family detention center in Texas. She was only there for 19 days and then she was released to her sister in Seattle. Meanwhile, Magdiel was in detention for about three months in San Diego.

Once the family gets to Seattle, they felt they had to find a place where they could be on their own. How did they find the synagogue?

I actually reached out to a volunteer who had worked with Pueblo Sin Fronteras. She recommended reaching out to a local chapter of the International Rescue Committee because they sometimes offer shelter. They didn’t have any available shelter. And they said, we have some connections with some interfaith networks.

A week or two later I found out they’re moving into a home. A bunch of churches and synagogues made this announcement. At one synagogue a person heard the announcement. He had just moved to Seattle and had two neighboring homes and he said, “We’ve got this empty house.” So they just moved there and it ended up being two years. And they didn’t pay any rent while they were there.

The synagogue worked out an arrangement to help the family out. How did that work? Because they don’t have work permits while waiting for asylum to be granted, right?

People were already donating to this fund that was helping them with groceries and things like that. And then you see over the course of the film that Magdiel uses work as a way to cope with the healing that their whole family is going through at this time. Plus, you’re bored and you want to provide and you don’t wanna feel like a freeloader. So he was already starting to do volunteer work, mowing lawns, raking leaves for the community members that were helping them, and same with Mirna, cleaning houses. So as a result, the community members wanted to contribute more to this synagogue fund. So Magdiel and Mirna were contributing to their new community and the synagogue could feel like they were treating the family fairly.

Was the family lucky that they were in Seattle where the courts are friendlier to asylum-seekers?

So Immigration Court is actually a civil court and the immigration judges that preside over removal proceeding hearings are appointed by attorney generals. So they generally tend to mirror the political leaning of that area. Seattle is of course a very liberal city. However, the grant rate for the judge that presided over their case has pretty much the same approval grant rate as the national average, which is a little under 30%. It fluctuates by year. That’s why we ended up not putting any statistics in our film because it was just such a moving target and it changes so often and so drastically. The judge that saw Magdiel and Mirna’s case has one of the lower grant rates among the judges on the Seattle Immigration Court bench.

Magdiel massages Mirna’s feet in the documentary “All We Carry.” (Courtesy photo)

Immigration is back in the news because of the presidential election. Have you formed any conclusions about the U.S. immigration system?

I was really moved by the three days I spent on the train because it was harrowing and very stressful and dangerous. And at the same time, there are a lot of quiet moments of kids being kids, bickering over who gets the last cookie. And it was just these moments of simple daily human life, despite being in this pretty precarious situation. We don’t see those moments on the news, whether it’s in the height of the challenging moments or what happens after that. As an asylum-seeker, you’re essentially guilty until proven innocent. And so I was really eager to show what that limbo process is like.

I wanted the film to just strip away all of the politicized parts and make it a human story about a family. And I think that that will hopefully reach more people. We got to show what it means for a marriage to overcome trauma or healing in some way. That’s something a lot of people go through, not just asylum-seekers.