When Michael Lista went to stay 10 days at a lonely, one-storey motel in Emerson, Manitoba, he overpacked. His suitcase was full to the brim with clothes he didn’t end up wearing. It turned out that all he needed were his travel essentials—a pair of jeans, a pair of boots, a parka, and most important, a beat-up Sony voice recorder, complete with scratches on its small LED screen and dust in the crevasses of the speaker grilles. For Lista, a self-described Luddite, that palm-sized device is his baby; the single-most important tool for his line of work.
His room at the motel was a relic of a past long gone. A frayed, low-pile carpet lined the floor, the beige wallpaper stained by humidity and the passage of time. Lista had no complaints, though, for two reasons: the first being that the kind folks that managed the motel charged less than $50 per night. The other reason was because the Maple Leaf Motel was exactly where Lista intended to be. His goal was to tell the story of his next-door neighbours: asylum-seekers who, fearing President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration regime, fled the United States and ended up in a small town with a population of fewer than 700, some 200 metres north of the border.
Lista chronicled the story of refugees like Ahmed, a gay man who endured capsizing migrant boats, deadly spiders, a robbery, and imprisonment during his three-year journey from Ecuador to southern Winnipeg. He shared the story of a young man named Koffi, who feared deportation back to Ghana. Emerson, being so close to the U.S. border, was a town filled with Odyssean tales like these, of the people who were forced to cross the lines of legality to escape the perilousness of their home country. And because their stories so often involved breaking immigration laws, Lista had a concern: would he be putting his sources in jeopardy simply by speaking with them?