Long Island, N.Y. The immigrants from El Salvador represent the biggest foreign community in the island. In 2017 the Trump administration has abolished their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and intend to deport 200.000 salvadorians.
These people, who have been living in the States for over 20 years and whose children born in American soil are U.S. citizens, will be forced to leave their homes and jobs by the 9th of September 2019, or else they will be forcefully deported. Families will be torn apart: husbands will be separated from their spouses, and children will loose their parents. People will have to return in one of the most violent places in the world, falling pray of the infamous gangs that raid their home country.
It has not been easy to shoot the documentary. Even if our protagonists agreed quite from the beginning to participate in the project, it has taken a while, three years, to win their total confidence. But in the end they agreed to tell their full story in front of the camera.
Our protagonists: Luis, Ernesto, Rosa, Maria and Jinmer, represent the thousand of sin voz, the voiceless people who risked their lives crossing the desert, people whose friends and relatives have died during the journey, people that have known what it means to live in the shadow of violence and terror, people who bring with them nightmares impossible to forget.
They arrived with the dream of a land of justice and freedom, only to discover that simple survival was extremely difficult, that exploitation was the rule, that discrimination was everywhere in everyday life. They endured sickness, suffering, alcoholism, cried the death of a son and lived in desperation for the kidnapping of a beloved. They fought to gain the dignity that was stolen from them; they clung to faith so that their dreams could be made possible. And they stayed. Nothing could stop them in their fight for a better life, for a piece of the American dream.
Then Trump signed off with a stroke of a pen every dream they had, returning them to a life of fear. But they will continue to live on the American soil undocumented, invisible as ghosts, rather than risk their lives back in their homeland.