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Directed by WITNESS Produced by WITNESS The American Friends Service Committee ACLU Genre Runtime: 4 min Release Date: April 2008 Filmmaker's Website Send to Friends |
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Plot Outline
What happens when people cross the line? Vigilantes take the law into their own hands on the U.S.-Mexican border.
Awards
Winner of the Immigration Award
Filmmaker Notes
More About Rights on the Line: Vigilantes at the Border from Producer WITNESS
Rights on the Line: Vigilantes at the Border exposes the ugly anti-immigrant politics that lurk behind the Minuteman Project and also illustrates the continuum between official border militarization and vigilante action. Human rights activists and residents of border communities shot this video.
Rights on the Line: Vigilantes at the Border was produced in order to halt the growth of the vigilante movement, as well as prompt a broader discussion around the impact of current U.S. immigration policies. In the aftermath of September 11th, immigration again became a hot button issue. Concerned about inhumane treatment of U.S.-Mexico border crossers, the American Friends Service Committee worked to bring attention to the expanding powers of border law enforcement and increased activity by vigilante groups like the Minuteman Project, seeking to recast the current immigrants’ rights debate in the U.S. within a broader human rights framework. As part of this project, AFSC partnered with WITNESS and the ACLU to produce Rights on the Line: Vigilantes at the Border in September 2005.
The film has mobilized migrant communities to join human rights campaigns and prompted hundreds of people to become legal observers in border regions. In Austin, the video helped lead the City Council to unanimously approve a resolution opposing vigilantes and requiring authorities to monitor and report all Minuteman activities back to the council. The video was covered by radio and television networks along the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2006, the video mobilized people in San Eliza Rio, Texas, to make their own film about racial profiling in their community, which was submitted as testimony at the State Capitol in a campaign that led the local sheriff to eliminate traffic checkpoints used to spot undocumented migrants.
FILMMAKER BIOS
WITNESS, Producer
WITNESS was founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation as a project of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First). Today, WITNESS is an independent nonprofit organization with offices in Brooklyn, New York, and human rights partners based around the world.
WITNESS partners fight for the rights of indigenous people, for an end to systemic gender violence and the use of children as soldiers, and for environmental protection where human communities are at stake. They work with diverse groups from all over the world, carefully selecting their partners based on the strength of their human rights work and the clarity of their mission. Using video to enhance their campaigns, they make sure their voices are heard. Even more importantly, they help empower these groups by mobilizing a response to right the wrongs they document.
Pedro Rios, Co-Producer
Pedro is the Program Director at AFSC, San Diego. Pedro’s office helps lead Project Voice, an AFSC initiative designed to strengthen the voices of immigrant-led organizations in setting the national agenda for immigration policy and immigrants’ rights. Project Voice combines local and national organizing, education, and outreach campaigns to foster a fuller integration of immigrants and refugees in their new communities and to achieve a strategic impact on immigration policy in the United States.
Ray Ybarra, Co-Producer
Ray was named as one of six Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellow by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2005. He focused on documenting the actions of vigilantes, including intimidation, physical abuse, and the unlawful imprisonment of border crossers and worked with AFSC and WITNESS to produce Rights on the Line. He is currently finishing his degree at Standford Law School where he has been recognized as a Public Interest Fellow, an Allen E. Broussard Scholar, a recipient of a Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) Law School Scholarship. Ray works to defend the civil rights of Latino communities across the nation.
Tamaryn Nelson, Co-Producer
Tamaryn is the Program Coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean at WITNESS. She has experience working at NGOs and inter-governmental agencies in both the Americas and Africa. Prior to WITNESS, Tamaryn served as the Secretariat Coordinator for the Inter-American Coalition for the Prevention of Violence and previously worked at the Center for Justice and International Law, an NGO primarily dedicated to bringing human rights cases before the Inter-American System of Human Rights. Tamaryn has a degree in International Relations from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. A native of Brazil, she speaks fluent Portuguese, Spanish and English.