“Separated”: Film Shows How Trump Tore Immigrant Families Apart, 1,300 Kids Still Alone

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with the acclaimed new documentary Separated, which looks at the horrors of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that led to the separation of up to 5,500 children from their parents, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, as they sought asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The disturbing policy was enforced as early as July 2017, months before Trump officials even acknowledged it was happening. To this day, over a thousand children are still separated from their families, many remaining in the U.S. after their parents were deported to their home countries. This is the trailer of Separated.

JONATHAN WHITE: Separation from your parent is a profoundly traumatizing event. But systematic separation of children from parents, officially, it wasn’t happening. But it was happening.

ERROL MORRIS: You should tell me how you got involved in all of this.

SCOTT LLOYD: Define “all this.”

JACOB SOBOROFF: Their version of stopping people from coming into the country was taking children away from their parents so that people wouldn’t come.

JALLYN SUALOG: Our field staff started to notice very young kids, tender age, anyone below 5. That’s kind of unusual, right?

JACOB SOBOROFF: What “zero tolerance” did was turn their helpers into their worst nightmare.

BORDER PATROL AGENT 1: Freeze! Freeze! Don’t move! Don’t move!

BORDER PATROL AGENT 2: Stop! On your knees!

SEN. HEIDI HEITKAMP: So, if you thought the child was endangered —

DHS SECRETARY JOHN KELLY: Not routinely — sure, right.

SEN. HEIDI HEITKAMP: — that’s the only circumstance to which you would separate?

DHS SECRETARY JOHN KELLY: Can’t imagine doing it otherwise.

JACOB SOBOROFF: The government thought that showing the world separations through the eyes of people like me, they would scare the [bleep] out of people that were attempting to come from coming.

Is that the right strategy?

DHS SECRETARY KIRSTJEN NIELSEN: So, if you’re part of a family and you break the law, you will be incarcerated.

JACOB SOBOROFF: I’ve honestly never seen anything like that. There were about 1,500 kids in there.

BRIAN KAREM: You’re a parent. Don’t you have any empathy for what they go through?

LEE GELERNT: We now know this was right from the get-go. Someone must have been planning this.

NEWS ANCHOR: A federal judge says the government needs to reunite young immigrant children with their parents.

JONATHAN WHITE: We had 14 days to reunify all of the children under 5.

JALLYN SUALOG: Their assessment form in the system doesn’t have that much information. What’s your mom’s name? Mom. Like every mom, their name is Mom.

LEE GELERNT: Do I call this child abuse? Do I call it torture?

JONATHAN WHITE: Separation was the purpose. Prosecution was the tool.

LEE GELERNT: It’s not over. Five years later, we are still trying to reunite up to a thousand children.

JONATHAN WHITE: There is really nothing to stop them.

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS: This is a new era.

JONATHAN WHITE: It troubles me profoundly that it could happen again.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. The Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, director of this new film, Separated, and many other documentaries — he did The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, The Unknown Known, many more — he joins us from Cambridge, Massachusetts. And here in New York, we’re joined by Jacob Soboroff, NBC News political and national correspondent, whose 2020 book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, inspired Morris’s documentary. Separated begins a weeklong Academy Award-qualifying run at the IFC Center here in New York tonight, before it’s released in theaters and broadcast on MSNBC this December. We’re joined both by Errol Morris in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jacob Soboroff.

Jacob, your book was astounding, your work and what’s being shown in Errol Morris’s film. Talk about what happened on the border, and actually the trajectory that led to that. It didn’t start with Trump, though, to say the least, he exacerbated the situation.

JACOB SOBOROFF: Yeah, it certainly didn’t — first of all, thank you so much, Amy, for having me back, and it’s an honor, as always, to be here. And it’s been a profound honor to work with Errol on this project.

And I think that, you know, when you talk about — remind folks about what happened, don’t take my word for it, listen to the George W. Bush-, Republican-appointed judge in the Southern District of California who stopped this policy and called it “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country,” the deliberate separation of, as you said, over 5,500 children from their parents, for no other reason other than to harm those children to scare other families, largely from Central America, from coming to the United States.

And I guess what you’ll see in the film, what Errol has done so beautifully is lay out how the Trump admin — first of all, American immigration policy over the course of decades led us to this moment. It was a bipartisan immigration policy from Democrats and Republicans that was based in deterrence and based in hurting people as the official policy of the United States to make sure other people didn’t come. We know it doesn’t work. It still doesn’t work. It didn’t work under Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama — who deported more people than any other president in the history of the United States. It certainly didn’t work under Donald Trump, who deliberately separated all these children. And under President Biden now, a turn back to deterrence-based policies. And what the film does is put it all in context in the way that only Errol Morris can. And I can’t wait for everybody to see it.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip of Jonathan White, the former deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, in the film Separated.

JONATHAN WHITE: If you have children, you need only imagine your own child in a foreign country, not speaking the language, with no parent, with no money, not understanding how that society works, having been apprehended by federal immigration authorities. Each of these children is your child in that situation. I could never explain to someone why they should care, but I can tell you that a lot of people do care and care profoundly.

Every day there are children who enter the United States unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian. And those children require protection and care, to find a family member of theirs in the United States who can take care of them. Family separation, though, was not about unaccompanied children. It was about accompanied children. It was about children with their families. And the Unaccompanied Children program, which I worked in, was essentially hijacked for a purpose for which it was never intended nor authorized in law. It was a program designed to be a child protection program for children who enter the United States without parents, and it was instead used as a tool to take children from their parents.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Jonathan White, former deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, in the film Separated. He was a commander and now a captain. Errol Morris, if you can talk about those who agreed to be part of your documentary, those who thought they were going to be in it, but then decided to leave once they got to the interview site? Talk about the film that you made.

ERROL MORRIS: A difficult film to make, because few people wanted to talk, and few people could talk. People who were still working for the government were constrained by that fact alone from actually appearing in the film.

But it’s a sad and disheartening story. We all know immigration has become a political hot potato. It’s also become a hotbed of lies. If you want to hear really extraordinary lying, listen to people on both sides talking about immigration, although the Republicans certainly have the lead, the lead in lying, self-deception, misrepresentation. It’s endless. And this is a disheartening story particularly for someone like myself whose parents and grandparents were immigrants who came to this country. This is how we want to treat people? No one wants to disagree and say that there isn’t a problem with immigration. That would be foolish, because there is. But still, it comes down to how we treat people coming into this country or people who want to come into this country. And it’s an embarrassment.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s listen to how we treat people. In 2018, ProPublica released audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility in which kids between the ages of 4 and 10 are heard crying “Mama,” “Papa,” after being separated from their parents at the southern border.

CHILD: [crying] Papi! Papi! Papi! Papi!

BORDER PATROL AGENT: [translated] Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we’re missing is a conductor.

AMY GOODMAN: “We have the crying orchestra right here. What we’re missing is the conductor,” the Border Patrol agent mocking them, Jacob Soboroff, this significant moment that riveted the country, and the abhorrent — the feeling of people across the political spectrum of these children being separated. Talk about who would and wouldn’t be interviewed.

JACOB SOBOROFF: Yeah. And I remember that moment, too, because I was down on the border. It was Ginger Thompson at ProPublica that published that, that audio. And you’ll hear it again in the film, put into the context of these beautiful narrative vignettes that Errol has created with Eugenio Caballero, the Oscar-winning production designer, and this wonderful cast of Mexican actors and the Mexican crew that basically recreated what nobody got to see. The point you made, Amy, here, by showing this, actually, I think, is that nobody really got — I was inside those facilities, but nobody — and saw with my own eyes, but there’s no footage inside those facilities. There’s leaked audio from those facilities.

And I think it’s part of the reason, to get to your question, why some of the officials who were part of this policy, like Tom Homan, the former director of ICE and potentially the future director of the Department of Homeland Security under former President Trump — and Errol, you know, tells the story better than I do — but showed up at the studio in Cambridge to be interviewed by Errol, only to leave before sitting down in front of Errol and the Interrotron. But on the other hand, there were people like Jonathan White, like Jallyn Sualog, career civil servants who spent their lives worrying about this and tried to protect these children and did show up.

AMY GOODMAN: And head of homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen?

JACOB SOBOROFF: Yeah, she didn’t show up, either. Errol and —

AMY GOODMAN: Errol, you spoke to her for many, many hours?

ERROL MORRIS: I spoke to her for many, many hours. But in the end, she refused actually to appear on film.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about her significance, Jacob.

JACOB SOBOROFF: Well, she signs — and you’ll see it in the movie — she signs the decision memo, option three on this line, despite receiving a pair of contradictory memos, one from John Mitnick, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, that said, “You may very well violate” — I’m paraphrasing here — “the Constitution of the United States by deliberately separating these children,” and nevertheless, at the urging of officials like Kevin McAleenan, who was the head of Customs and Border Protection, signed it to enact this policy and separate all these children.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Homan addressed the RNC. And we were both on the floor of the RNC.

JACOB SOBOROFF: We were.

AMY GOODMAN: And I saw you going over to Don Trump Jr., yes, Donald Trump’s son, about the family separation policy. Let’s play a clip.

JACOB SOBOROFF: I know immigration is important to him. I covered the family separation crisis closely. Will we continue to see policies like separating 5,000 children deliberately from their parents?

DONALD TRUMP JR.: You mean the Obama administration, in which [inaudible] — 

JACOB SOBOROFF: You know they didn’t do that, sir.

DONALD TRUMP JR.: OK, sure.

JACOB SOBOROFF: Will there be a second family separation policy?

DONALD TRUMP JR.: It’s MSDNC, so I expect nothing less from you clowns. Even today, even 48 hours later, you couldn’t wait. You couldn’t wait with your lies and with you nonsense. Now just get out of here.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I was standing right behind you, and he stormed away as he was telling you to get out of here.

JACOB SOBOROFF: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: But the significance of what he’s saying? And who makes the decisions? Can this happen again? I mean, you have a thousand kids now that still are separated?

JACOB SOBOROFF: Over 1,300, actually, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

And, you know, the thing about that exchange is you’ll notice that he didn’t address the question, actually. And not just him, but former President Trump, JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr., none of them will address whether or not they will reenact this policy, will put this policy back into place, which I think raises — and Tom Homan, by the way, himself, at CPAC, got up there and said, “You know, I don’t want to” — and it’s in the movie — “I don’t want to hear about family separations anymore. I’m still facing lawsuits about this.” Nobody said, “We won’t do it.”

And what do you think a mass deportation policy is, deporting more people than Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954? You know, that is family separation. There are families that are mixed-status families. And that’s the official policy of the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign. And as I said, these were the Republican policies of the Trump administration, but it wouldn’t have happened were it not for decades of bipartisan deterrence-based immigration policy that continues to this day.

AMY GOODMAN: And the role of Congress?

JACOB SOBOROFF: Congress hasn’t done anything to protect the children who have been separated and to ban family separation in perpetuity. It just hasn’t happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Errol Morris, you wanted this film out before the election. Why?

ERROL MORRIS: Well, it’s, I think, pretty damn obvious. I don’t think it particularly looks good for Donald Trump. A number of administrations had considered the possibility of separating parents and children at the border and rejected it, because it was clearly inhumane. Not Donald Trump.

And one of the most appalling aspects of this policy is there were arguments about keeping records. “OK, let’s separate the children, but let’s not actually keep a record of how to ever reunite them. Let’s separate them for good. Let’s just create orphans. Abandon children.” To me, it’s the most appalling part of the policy. It’s a policy — if one hasn’t noticed this in all of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, it’s a policy of meanness.

AMY GOODMAN: Errol Morris, we’re going to have to leave it there.

ERROL MORRIS: You can say it’s deterrence. You can say it’s this. You can say it’s that. But at its heart, it’s a policy of meanness.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Separated is premiering tonight at IFC here in New York City, has a weeklong run, and then it’s going to be on MSNBC, but after the election?

JACOB SOBOROFF: It’ll be on in December. We’re going to get the theatrical release out of the way first. And I’m excited for people to see it whenever and wherever they can see it.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Jacob Soboroff is author of Separated and is one of the stars of the film Separated, directed by Errol Morris.

Happy birthday to Becca Staley! I’m Amy Goodman.