ARTnews | How Artists Responded to 2025’s Surging ICE Raids

In a new multi-channel video installation, The Border (Los Pollos vs. La Migra), Julio César Morales reworks a Hollywood dramatization of the US-Mexico border, the 1982 film The Border, isolating and enlarging the migrants who originally appeared only in the periphery. Cutting out the original’s protagonists (la migra, slang for “immigration agents,” or ICE) and centering los pollos (the migrants derisively likened to chickens destined for slaughter), the artist exposes the brutality that our cultural and political narratives deliberately minimize. An accompanying film, We Don’t See (2025), deepens the inquiry: scenes from the 1982 drama are overlaid with reflections from the artist’s friend, a former border patrol agent. At one point, he says, “We don’t see their screams, we don’t see their conflicting emotions.” Together, the works grapple with the enduring durability of early cultural narratives and how urgently their assumptions need to be overwritten.