Publicity still from The Pitt. (Photo credit: HBOMax via MovieStillsDB)
WHEN I’M NOT COVERING IMMIGRATION, I like to watch prestige TV. I treat it as a way to unwind and give myself space from the chaos and human suffering that often comes when covering immigration in the Trump era.
Which is why it was so jarring last week when one of my favorite shows, The Pitt, centered its episode on the main topic of my reporting over the last year: the disruptive impacts of ICE.
For those who haven’t seen it, The Pitt is a popular hospital drama where each episode depicts roughly in real time an hour of a day in the emergency room. The show tries to put us in the shoes of people we are not like or whom we have not often considered. It asks us to have empathy and compassion for these patients as well as the people trying to help them within a hospital system, where frustration and emotion can often run high.
Last week’s episode, “5:00 P.M.,” stayed true to those elements, only this time the source of the frustration, drama, and emotion was ICE agents who came storming into the ER in search of an immigrant who was there.
Things get rolling when some commotion in the ER attracts the attention of Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) and Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif). They look up to see two federal agents hauling in a terrified immigrant who is clearly in immense pain.
The immigrant is named Pranita (Ramona DuBarry), and she is a restaurant worker who was caught up in the chaos of a raid and thrown down a flight of stairs, which has likely torn her rotator cuff. It’s hard to find a more true-to-life premise in television right now: Pranita’s plight evokes the memory of so many similar stories we’ve seen and heard over the last year of immigrants trying to flee federal agents or being hurt by them. And of course the two agents who have apprehended Pranita won’t let her call her daughter to let her know where she is.
The presentation of the two ICE agents speaks volumes. The first one, agent Russo (Juju Alexander), is tall and masked; the camera looks up at him in a way that reinforces the sense of threat and intimidation, and you can see the way this sense radiates out to various members of the hospital staff, from the main characters to the other hospital personnel and patients waiting in the ER. The second agent, Correa¹ (Josell Mariano), goes without a mask and for that reason alone seemed infinitely more human than his partner. The Instagram algorithm later served me Mariano’s post about filming the episode: “I found myself imagining what it would feel like to find my own mother or father in that same situation,” he wrote. He highlighted several behind-the-scenes photos, which he offered at the end to, as he put it, “hopefully make you not hate me.”
I found the actor’s reflections on his performance fascinating, so I reached out to ask for an interview. When we spoke, Mariano told me ...
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