Five years after its statehood and a few months after the United States' entry into World War I, xenophobia and anti-unionism is growing in the southernmost towns of Arizona near the Mexican border.

In Bisbee, immigrant workers organized and were violently rounded up and transported to the desert in New Mexico; not as famous as the events in nearby Tombstone, the deportation didn't live in the national memory, but is quietly remembered by the townsfolk today.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Bisbee '17 offers one town's reckoning with its own history as a compelling argument that the mistakes of the past are truly corrected only when they're faced head on.

[7] Writing for RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars, praising its exploration of more than just the event itself and for the use of certain images, saying about both that "a series of shots of carved-out quarry rock, the multicolored layers stacked up in the frame become metaphors for the movie you're watching, one of many that Bisbee '17 supplies as it goes along".

[5] Vanity Fair looked closer at the interviews with Bisbee residents, and compared the debate with the nation's present political situation in 2017; it notes that some of the views are "disconcerting" but is glad that the film doesn't make judgement.