About this Week’s Episode of Grey’s Anatomy – “Beautiful Dreamer”

Please note: Just for matters of transparency, I’m not a regular viewer of Grey’s Anatomy, so I cannot speak on the show’s internal universe, history, or character arcs from the point of view as a fan. I am merely approaching this one episode as a person who routinely analyzes how popular media depicts Central American characters, themes, or issues. Also I would like to thank Vicki Tatiana for posting on her Facebook feed about this episode and placing it on my radar!

The Story of Dr. Sam Bello

This past week, the ever-popular ABC medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy (now in its fourteenth season) had a very special episode titled “Beautiful Dreamer,” which centered on Dr. Sam Bello, a new character introduced this season and portrayed by Cuban-American actress, Jeanine Mason. Early into the episode, an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrives at the hospital asking to speak with Dr. Bello and, as it turns out, the new hospital surgical intern is a DACAmented migrant from El Salvador.

During the course of the episode, Sam Bello reveals to her colleagues that she was brought very young to the United States by her mother who fled the civil war after her husband, and Sam’s father, was murdered in front of their home. Despite all these adversities, through the hard work and sacrifice of her mother, Sam managed to not only attend medical school, but graduate magna cum laude and become a promising young physician in her field. The only reason ICE is even after her now is is due a largely innocuous reason: getting caught by a camera running a red light.

Now, by all accounts, this sounds like a textbook positive portrayal of a migrant who worked hard, did the right thing, and achieved the American Dream. And there’s a reason for that: actual undocumented medical students associated with the non-profit advocacy group, Define American, consulted with the writers of Grey’s Anatomy during the development of this episode and offered advice on how to accurately portray an undocumented medical student.

What I find rather interesting is that given how Mexicans make up the largest percentage of DACA recipients (70%), that the Grey’s Anatomy writers chose to make Dr. Sam Bello a Salvadoran instead. Part of me feels that is was 1) in part to offer a response to the “shithole” comments made by Donald Trump just a few weeks prior to the filming of the “Beautiful Dreamer” episode in February of 2018, and 2) to capitalize on the reputation of El Salvador as one the “most violent countries in the world“ and thereby increase dramatic tension as a deportation could equal a potential death sentence for the character of Dr. Bello.

Despite the character of Dr. Bello making an appeal to respectability politics through her academic and professionalism exceptionalism, and the unrealistic resolution to her undocumented status in her “voluntarily” leaving to study medicine in Zurich, Switzerland, I do feel content with seeing, for once, a member of Salvadoran community portrayed in a positive way–even if the actress is Cuban-American.

The Story of ICE Agent Martin Fields

Where the episode in my opinion takes a nose dive into the ocean of white non-sense is in how it chooses to portray the would-be antagonist, the ICE agent. During the course of the episode, the hospital staff tries to figure out how to help Dr. Bello while stalling the ICE agent, even going so far as to convince him that he has an irregular pulse, which in true soap opera form, reveals that the ICE agent has major heart problems and is in need of immediate surgery.

Rather than use this opportunity to depict the sheer power imbalance between the State (represented by ICE) and an undocumented person (Sam Bello), demonstrating how even possessing a medical degree doesn’t offer any protection whatsoever, the writers of the show decided to give the ICE agent a medical emergency, and thus not only prevent him from carrying out his charge, but also as a way to humanize him. But the worst part is that in doing so, whether intentionally or not, within the narrative of the episode, the life/death medical crisis of the ICE agent functions as a false equivalency with life/death legal crisis and potential deportation of Dr. Bello.

To add insult to injury, they then show the ICE agent in the operating room lamenting how his job as an immigration agent has become unbearable because he’s obligated to go after kids, pining for the old days when he felt like a sheriff and believed in law and order. Are you kidding me? That’s just lazy writing meant to make white liberals feel better and safer. Mmm-hmm, white people, keep believing that ICE is only bad today because Trump is bad, and that before ICE/INS was a noble institution defending America’s borders.

Never mind that the predecessor to ICE, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has a long history of racist actions against migrants, including the repatriation of millions of Mexicans in the 1930s, or the infamously named Operation Wetback in 1950s, or how it actively terrorized the Central American community throughout the 1980s. Also, never mind that itself ICE is a fascist little creation of the Homeland Security Act, resulting from the George W. Bush administration taking advantage of national hysteria and xenophobia following the 9/11 attacks.

Seriously, at a time when the jingoistic and white supremacist narrative of both the President of the United States and his administration is to systematically dehumanize migrants, particularly those from Central America, and then for a show as big as Grey’s Anatomy to use it’s considerable platform to discuss the issue but decide to give narrative space not only feel sorry for the white man whose job it is to hunt down non-white migrants, but to also give the government agency he works for (ICE) a chance to protect its legacy, is just unconscionable.

Then again, this is the new ABC we are talking about. A network that not only decided to bring back Roseanne as a mouth-piece for the poor, misunderstood white racist mid-Westerner, and allowed it to mock the networks people of color programming, but has been actively censoring it’s own people of color programming, like shelving an episode of Black-ish because it dealt with the “bending the knee” campaign.

I suppose then that a sympathetic depiction of an ICE agent is just par for the course for new white-friendly network.