In the article, Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz allege that officials threatened to use the “full weight” of the federal government to block certain scenes and that dissatisfaction with the Netflix doc came from, “all the way to the top.” The article also alleges that “the administration fought mightily to keep it from being released until after the 2020 election.”

Schwarz told the publication, “experiencing them is painful and scary and intimidating and at the same time angering and makes you want to fight to do the story.” ICE press secretary Jenny L. Burke, meanwhile, denied the pair’s claims and said the agency, “wholeheartedly disputes the allegations brought forward by filmmakers of this production.”

The reason for this is due to some scenes that allegedly show agents using deception to enter homes, while other scenes show officers mocking those they have detained. For example, one scene shows an officer illegally picking a lock to enter a building, while another shows officers lying to gain access to a home.

After the New York Times story came out, Schwartz said to the LA Times: “[The NYT story] it’s 100 percent accurate. There was a long, unfortunate process of them trying to shift the editorial and doing it in what we saw as a very bullying way. And I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t think that’s a surprise anymore about this administration. We’ve seen it in other places.”

Newsweek has reached out to an ICE spokesperson for comment on this and will update this article when we get a response.

The documentarian later added: “I don’t think it shows them as the bad guy necessarily. I think it shows their reality.

“I was a soldier. I served in a place where I didn’t agree with the politics. And maybe if someone documented everybody, everything, my platoon, it would at times look bad to me. I get it. Our message is look at the bigger systemic problem.”

The NYT article mentions town hall meetings in which ICE spokespeople told the public that the organization was focused on arresting and deporting felons, but as the documentary and other sources have shown, this is not necessarily the case. A 2018 report from Syracuse, for example, found that of the 44,000 individuals under ICE custody, 58 percent had no convictions.

This is partly due to the Trump administration allowing ICE agents to detain what is known as “collaterals,” undocumented immigrants discovered while searching for those who have committed crimes. In Immigration Nation, we see an officer talk to a supervisor over the phone, who says, “Start taking collaterals, man…I don’t care what you do, but bring at least two people.”

Another reason that ICE may have wanted to censor the doc could be due to it showing the cavalier attitude of some of its officers. As a review of the show by The Week said, “Part of what makes Immigration Nation so eye-popping is, quite simply, the stupidity—or perhaps arrogance—with which the ICE agents speak and act in front of rolling cameras.

“It is sickening to watch agents gleefully celebrate breaking apart families with their arrests, or mocking their detainees as the fathers, mothers, children, and grandparents sob in holding pens.”

However, the documentary series does show agents who are against this “collateral” policy. One officer, for example, says: “I don’t do collaterals. I just don’t think it’s right…I know it’s my job, but I got guys that are aggravated felons that I’d like to catch. I don’t care about the guy that’s minding his own business and cooperating with me.”

The presence of this agent is presented as a counter to the agents shown mocking families they broke up or those that say they are just doing their jobs. That is because, per Ciusiau’s interview with Fast Company, the aim had been to make an objective look at ICE as the anti-immigration rhetoric of President Trump changed the agency’s culture.

The filmmaker said: “We went back to the same spokesperson [they had previously worked with] and said, ‘You’re going to get a lot of heat. And it would be a good time to let somebody do an objective take on the agency from within.’”

Speaking previously to Newsweek, Schwarz followed this up by saying that the doc was trying to show that it is the system that is broken, but that individual agents are not the problem. The documentary maker said: “I think when it comes to ICE, trying to leave some of these pretexts behind, a lot of people are like, ‘oh, they’re just horrible’. I don’t think that’s the ICE officers we actually met, for the most part…you will have good cops and bad cops.”

Clusiau added: “It is a broken system…[it’s] systematic in the sense that all sides, everybody, is kind of chewed up by this broken system.”

Immigration Nation is streaming now on Netflix.