After the Raid

The boss got 18 months. Netflix got 24 minutes of everyone else.

April 5, 2018, Bean Station, Tennessee. IRS and ICE hit Southeastern Provision. 97 people rounded up. USA Today called it the nation's biggest workplace raid in a decade and the largest in Tennessee since the 1990s. James Brantley, 62, had ducked about $2.5 million in payroll taxes by paying undocumented workers in cash for 20 years. The Department of Justice plea said the hiring started in 1988. He pleaded guilty in September 2018 to tax fraud, wire fraud, and employing unauthorized aliens, and agreed to $1,423,588 in restitution. Judge Ronnie Greer sentenced him to 18 months on July 31, 2019, plus three years of probation. NBC News quoted the judge refusing probation. "I cannot impose a probationary sentence in this case". latestnetflix.com's view is that Food Safety News logged the concurrent 18-month counts and the same restitution number.

What Netflix bought was not the raid.

After the Raid landed on 19 December 2019. Wikipedia files a 24-minute documentary by Rodrigo Reyes, produced by No Ficción, about that Grainger County plant. TMDB stretches it to 25 minutes and credits Reyes as director and writer. Netflix's own card talks about emotional fallout and churchgoers asking what it means to love thy neighbor. TV-PG. Daily Beast said the short skips most of the raid. IRS financial-crimes work snowballed into an immigration investigation. Cash envelopes. A journalist on the soundtrack calls it the largest workplace raid in the past decade. The camera stays with Yahel, whose husband Cristino was taken, a local woman who took in a family of four, and a priest at St. John Paul II Catholic Mission. Yahel, in the film as Daily Beast quoted her, said they said goodbye that morning thinking they would see each other that afternoon. Remezcla named Gael García Bernal as executive producer, with Daniela Alatorre and Elena Fortes producing. A resident on camera says he never thought it would hit people in his own county. "I kept thinking the criminals are at the border".

Telemundo covered a watch party at Father Steve Pawelk's church on release night and called the film the fifth short in a U.S.-Mexico everyday-life series. Elena Fortes said this was the only one of the five directed by a Mexican living in the United States. IMDb keeps a 24-minute short with Reyes in the director chair. A YouTube trailer runs 2 minutes 8 seconds with the same logline.

The gossip is the sentence math. The man who ran the plant got a year and a half. Families got a half-hour of church light. Reyes did not stage the helicopters. He filmed what was left when they left.