In the previous documentary from Brave New Films, Gaza: Journalists Under Fire (2025), producer and director Robert Greenwald highlighted the astounding toll the Gaza war has taken not only on news workers but also on Palestinian children murdered by the tens of thousands. Greenwald’s latest production, ICE: No One is Safe, directed by Andres Useche, focuses on how the Trump Administration’s mass deportation purge is devastating disabled people—including U.S. citizens.
According to a title card in the approximately ten-minute film, about 300,000 people with disabilities have been rounded up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and other federal agents.
Greenwald’s documentary highlights several people with physical and developmental disabilities who have been brutalized and detained. The first to appear on screen is Wisconsin-born Aliya Rahman, a Bangladeshi American who was enmeshed in ICE’s siege of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and testified on February 3 at a U.S. House Committee on Oversight hearing.
Rahman explains that she has autism and a traumatic brain injury. She tells the Oversight Committee that on January 13, while on her way to an appointment at Hennepin County’s Traumatic Brain Injury Center, she “encountered a traffic jam caused by ICE vehicles, and no signs indicating how to get around it.” One agent, she conveyed euphemistically, yelled “Move! I will break your effing window!” as his first instruction. Then “agents on all sides of my vehicle yelled conflicting threats and instructions that I could not process while watching for pedestrians.”
She describes how agents smashed the glass of her vehicle’s passenger side window, with shards hitting her face. She cried out “I’m disabled!” to which an agent replied, “Too late.” One agent brandished “a large combat knife in front of my face,” which was used to cut off her seatbelt.
“Shooting pain went through my head, neck, and wrists when I hit the ground face first and people leaned on my back,” Rahman tells the lawmakers, saying she thought at the time of George Floyd, who was killed four blocks away in 2020. “I was carried face down through the street by my cuffed arms and legs while yelling that I had a brain injury and was disabled.” Video vignettes of this vicious treatment, shot by bystanders with cellphones, appear onscreen as Rahman speaks.
While Rahman’s abuse received national media coverage, ICE: No One Is Safe also exposes lesser-known cases of alleged mistreatment. It includes montages of ICE agents apparently running amok perpetrating excessive use of force.
The film primarily concentrates on Nicaragua-born Emmanuel Gonzalez-Garcia, an autistic, hard-of-hearing fifteen-year-old with speech difficulties. On October 5, Gonzalez-Garcia, who doesn’t have permanent legal status, wandered away from his mother Maria Garcia’s fruit stand to find a restroom and went missing in Houston. When local police found him, he was transferred to federal custody.
Garcia campaigned for the return of her son, supported by Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha (FIEL), an immigrant-led civil rights organization, and U.S. Representative Al Green. Green, a Democrat from Texas, was recently ejected from President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech for holding a sign that read“Black people aren’t apes,” referencing a racist meme circulated by President Donald Trump.
Ten minutes after holding a press conference in October, the Houston Police Department contacted Garcia for the first time. FIEL’s executive director, Cesar Espinosa, says onscreen: “Instead of being returned to his mom, which should have happened from the beginning, ICE was called and he was transferred to the [U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’s] Office of Refugee Resettlement.”
For forty-eight days, Gonzalez-Garcia was held in federal detention. But his mother’s relentless crusading, with vigils and press conferences backed by supporters, eventually led to their reunification. In ICE: No One Is Safe, she looks directly into the camera and says in Spanish: “Don’t be afraid to seek help.”
Greenwald’s documentary is composed largely of news clips, cellphone, and bodycam footage, and photos, with little if any original material shot by Greenwald’s crew. The music, titles, and editing by Brave New Films creates a cohesive, powerful anti-ICE message from disparate clips of pre-existing video. This technique, Greenwald tells The Progressive, points to a new way of making media in the twenty-first century.
“The nature of filmmaking has radically changed for those willing to utilize sometimes extraordinary firsthand eyewitness footage,” he says. “At Brave New Films, we’ve found the people all over the world using their cameras to record what’s going on to be both inspirational and very practical and useful. Combining this new source of video with the multiple sources of distribution opened by social media has opened up unique opportunities.”
Brave New Films, based in Culver City, California, was founded by Greenwald as a nonprofit film distribution and production company. The renowned producer and director has focused on creating topical documentaries about the contested 2000 presidential election, the Iraq War, Fox News, and more.
While rightwingers and Christian nationalists bray about their purported piety, Brave New Films has trained its lens on the least of these among us. As Espinosa, one of Gonzalez-Garcia’ protectors, warns onscreen, “Today it happens to them. Tomorrow it could happen to any of us.”
With ICE: No One is Safe, Brave New Films continues to highlight attacks on our most vulnerable and those willing to stand up for them by pioneering a new media form to generate conscience and consciousness aimed at melting the ICE Age.
For information about how to watch the free March 22 world premiere of ICE: No One is Safe and conversation with Robert Greenwald, register here.
ICE: No One Is Safe was made possible through the following partnerships with many leading advocacy and community organizations working at the intersection of immigrant justice and disability rights: FIEL Houston • Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law • Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network (AWN) • Multicultural Autism Action Network • Disability Rights California • Mental Health Advocacy Services • Free Speech for People • California Community Fund • Solidarity Organizing Initiiative.
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Editor's Note: This review was updated to include the name of director Andres Useche.