What happened to the Chinese migrants in Walk The Line? ICE Nation revisits them 2 years on
CNA’s Wei Du discusses how this new chapter, filmed amid rising unrest after a fatal ICE shooting, not only picks up the migrants’ stories where they left off, but also provides a revealing insight into the US.
Dad, Mum and daughter Lucy from Walk The Line visiting the Golden Gate Bridge in California, where they now live.
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SINGAPORE: Just over two years ago, they staked everything on the American dream — and made it across illegally. Now they are reckoning with what it takes to stay.
The series, ICE Nation, returns to the Chinese migrants first introduced in Walk The Line — the award-winning documentary that traced their perilous, emotionally fraught journeys to the United States.
“These migrants had this sort of super rosy picture of the US at that time,” CNA senior correspondent Wei Du recalled. “(They weren’t) fully aware of what they were getting themselves into.”
That gap between expectation and reality lies at the heart of the new series premiering this week.
In the years since the migrants entered the US, the ground has shifted. Under the Trump administration, immigration is again one of the country’s starkest fault lines.
“A lot of the new administration’s threats have become reality,” Du noted. “People have really experienced the very harsh pushback.”
Having remained in touch with many of the profiles in the first season — including the Chengdu Christian family and the Zhao family — she has picked up their stories where they left off.
“Most of them had to go through quite sharp adjustments,” she told CNA Insider. “You’ll definitely sense that … recalibration of what reality is. And ‘is this really working for me?’”
Beyond individual journeys, ICE Nation sketches out a country grappling not only with immigration but with unrest.
With “surreal timing”, as she described it, the CNA crew arrived in the US a day after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, 37, by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis.
The incident ignited protests and intensified the debate over immigration enforcement. Du, who has covered protests in Hong Kong, said the unrest captured in ICE Nation was less predictable, with tensions escalating with little warning.
“I’m slightly ashamed to admit I was more scared (during) filming in Minneapolis than at any one time during the original filming (of Walk The Line),” she shared.
As a foreign journalist, she was advised by lawyers that authorities could decide it was “not in the best interest of the United States” and effectively bar her from returning.
MORE VOICES, NO EASY LABELS
Walk The Line won Best Documentary Series in the 2024 Asian Academy Creative Awards and gold awards last year in the World Media Festivals Television and Corporate Media Awards as well as the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards.
Among other accolades, it was nominated for an International Emmy in the Current Affairs category.
This time, ICE Nation introduces more voices, from officials to activists, revealing a country that resists easy labels.
“We tend to think Americans are quite left and right,” Du reflected. “In reality, … it really isn’t like everybody has (one) set of beliefs that they apply to different situations.”
The documentary captures this through unlikely figures, including a MAGA mum who becomes an ally to migrants, and two ICE observers who are teenage brothers raised in an evangelical Christian household.
“The vast majority of the people who are out protesting weren’t directly affected by the immigration raids,” said Du.
“They’re fighting for other people because they believe that America is an idea — that it receives whoever comes here to make an honest living.”
That idea, and the question of whom it belongs to, runs through the series. It also surfaces in some second-generation Asian Americans whose parents migrated legally, but who now challenge long-held stigmas within their communities around illegal migrants.
For Du, ICE Nation completes a story that never really ended at the border, because “what comes afterwards is such a big, important part of the story”, she said.
Walk The Line: ICE Nation premieres at 7pm on Thursday, May 7. Catch Part 2 in the same time slot on Friday.
