Trump has publicly defended the idea that cruelty is a useful tool for “deterrence.” Under that principle, family separation has been reinstated with renewed vigor. Parents are torn from their children, who are then classified as “unaccompanied” and sent to detention centers without any guarantee of reunification. This institutional sadism is neither a mistake nor an excess, but part of a deliberate political strategy meant to send a message: coming to the United States can cost you your family, your childhood, even your life. The magnitude of this repressive project is sustained by astronomical figures. The budget allocated to immigration operations and ICE expansion exceeds one hundred and seventy billion dollars. This is not a set of improvised measures, but an industrialized machinery of exclusion, complete with prisons, detention camps, and military deployments. The border is no longer just a geographical line: it is a laboratory where new forms of social control are tested, later exported to other spheres.
The film directly engages with this context. In it, repression is not episodic but permanent. Perfidia’s betrayal—her decision to collaborate with the authorities in order to save herself—mirrors how state power fragments resistance, offering individual escape in exchange for dismantling collective projects. It is a metaphor for how, in reality, immigration enforcement seeks to sow mistrust, weaken community solidarity, and replace mutual support with individual survival. The film’s sixteen-year time jump underscores the continuity of this violence. Bob, now a defeated ex-revolutionary, lives with his daughter in a world where nothing essential has changed. Migrant repression persists, militarization intensifies, detention centers continue to operate. What is inherited is not only the memory of repression but also its normalization. Willa, the daughter, symbolizes the new generations growing up in an environment where hostility toward migrants is part of the landscape, forced to decide whether to resign themselves or resist.
What is fascinating about One Battle After Another is that it avoids turning the revolutionaries into flawless heroes. They are clumsy, disorganized, often ridiculous. And yet, their struggle persists. That insistence—that capacity to keep fighting “one battle after another”—is the political core of the film. Anderson seems to suggest that resistance is not measured by definitive victories, but by the ability to persist in the face of a system designed to exhaust and destroy. Today, with Trump doubling down on his project of mass deportations and even seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship for children of immigrants, the film reads as an immediate commentary. The grotesque figure of Lockjaw reflects the racist and authoritarian impulses shaping the current political moment. What appears on screen as satire takes form in real life as presidential speeches, executive orders, and police raids. The grotesque is no longer only caricature: it has become the political normality of a country that has turned migration into a synonym for threat.
One Battle After Another offers no easy solutions. Nor does it present revolutionary utopias. What it shows is the persistence of a system of structural violence and, at the same time, the necessity of resisting even when the horizon seems impossible. Anderson’s cinema thus becomes a political act: by refusing to situate itself in a precise time, it manages to speak of all times, including our own. And in doing so, it reminds us that hostility toward migrants is not a passing episode but an open wound spanning generations. The film poses an uncomfortable question: if migratory violence is structural and perpetual, what role is left for us? Anderson does not provide an answer, but he suggests that the only option is never to stop fighting. However clumsy the resistance, however partial the victories, however infinite the repression may appear, the one intolerable stance is passivity.
