With just over a month to go until President-elect Trump’s inauguration, questions remain about how he plans to approach a variety of issues. Voter anxieties about immigration in particular were key to Trump’s victory, and as he prepares to take office for a second time, many are revisiting the legacy of his first term.
With that in mind, we begin a miniseries, looking at immigration through the lens of three recent pieces of media. Each of them uses one specific story to understand the broader narrative of immigration in America — and we begin with a new documentary called “Separated.”
“Separated” is directed by Oscar-winner Errol Morris, and it’s based on a book by MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff.
Soboroff also executive-produced the film, which tells the story of a scandal from Trump’s first term: the family separation policy. The program, which took children from their parents at the border and placed them in prison-like detention centers, was ultimately revoked, thanks to reporting from Soboroff and other journalists. But while family separation represented the extremes of Trump’s ideology, Soboroff says it was the extension of a decades-long framework for American immigration policy: deterrence.
Soboroff joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
JACOB SOBOROFF: Deterrence has been the stated immigration policy of Democratic and Republican administrations for the better part of a generation. And Bill Clinton, you know, using an official policy called Prevention Through Deterrence enacted a policy that was intended by building the first wave of border walls to send migrants crossing the border into dangerous and deadly crossings knowing they would die trying. George W Bush exponentially increased the size of the Border Patrol in the wake of 911 after he created the Department of Homeland Security. Barack Obama deported more people than any president in the history of the nation.
And that's why Donald Trump with the snap of a finger essentially, you know, as early as Valentine's Day 2017, as you see in the film, people were able to gather in a room and hatch this plan and make it happen. Deterrence has never worked. If it did, if it ever had, people would stop coming here. And that's certainly not the case.
SAM DINGMAN: Going back to the first Trump administration. Let's talk a little bit about your reporting on Kirstjen Nielsen, the former secretary of Homeland Security who presided over the separation policy. One of the big revelations for me in the film is the fact that she was explicitly told in a memo that there would be vigorous legal challenges to this policy that it was in all likelihood unconstitutional. And she did it anyway.
SOBOROFF: I'm so glad you caught that, that, you know, she was advised by John Mitnick who was her general counsel at the time that in a pair of contradictory memos, one was the decision memo. She had the opportunity to sign this and effectually referrals to the Justice Department of Parents for prosecution, which would separate them knowingly from their Children. You know, we call it the family separation policy. They call it a referral policy. But what it did was deliberately split up parents and Children on purpose.
And she got this other memo that said not only would family separations and these referrals potentially violate several American laws including the due process, rights of the people coming here in order to seek asylum.
Why did she do it? You know, she told me she was just following the law. What I know for sure is she knew what the consequences of the policy would be and she put it into place anyway, knowing those consequences.
DINGMAN: Yeah. You know, one other element from, from that sequence in the film that I was really shocked by. And I, I want to ask if I, if I understood it correctly, is that the crime of entering the United States illegally is technically a misdemeanor, is that right?
SOBOROFF: Yeah, 1325 U.S. code 1325. It is not a crime that was ever prosecuted with any level of regularity before this family separation policy, especially when it was related to children and families. The idea that for a misdemeanor, you would take a parent away from a child and not keep any records and not have a precise way to put them back together is in the words of physicians for human rights, a torture according to the UN definition. It is government sanctioned child abuse, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The punishment did not fit the so-called crime and the ACLU and others would argue that they had the legal right to be there and to be declaring asylum in the manner that they did. People have the international right to come to our border, to declare asylum. And during the family separation policy of the Trump administration, when they came to do that, the people who they believed to be their helpers from whatever circumstance they were fleeing turned out to be their worst nightmare.
DINGMAN: Well, another big revelation, I'm using that phrase a lot because there were many of them for me in watching this is that we have an Office of Refugee Resettlement.
I didn't know that we had one of those and that it is staffed at least in part by what we see in the film, by some genuinely compassionate people who are …
SOBOROFF: Heroes.
DINGMAN: … doing work as that as one of them characterizes it is politically thankless and pretty unpopular. But as the film shows, their work was sort of used to launder the legality of the separation policy. Talk a little bit about how that was done.
SOBOROFF: In the words of, Jonathan White, the then deputy head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a career official, the program which was meant to take care and custody of unaccompanied migrant children arriving in the United States by themselves was hijacked by this Trump administration policy because it was rendering accompanied children unaccompanied and placing them in the care and custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, one of the few bright moments in this story is when the ACLU files a lawsuit against the Trump administration which is successful. And as a result, a judge orders the administration to reunify the separated families. And this guy Jonathan White, who you mentioned, gets put in charge of that and he somehow manages to match thousands of children who were separated. At the risk of stating the obvious though, if that lawsuit hadn't happened, these families would have just never been reunited, right?
SOBOROFF: 100%.
DINGMAN: This work of reunifying the families which began in 2018, it's ongoing to this day, right? We we still have not gotten all of these kids reconnected with their parents.
SOBOROFF: Yeah, and that's because in large part, the record keeping was so shoddy that they haven't been able to track everybody down and those they have been able to track down, some of them don't trust the fact that these nongovernmental organizations like Justice and Motion are reaching out to them on behalf of the Biden administration and truly do want to put parents and children back together.
This is the same U.S. government in the minds of some of these families that ripped them apart in the first place.
DINGMAN: Thomas Homan, who is the former Director of ICE and is thought of as the intellectual father of separation, is going to be Donald Trump's borders czar are in his next term. And as Jonathan White …
SOBOROFF: Whatever that, whatever that job means, sorry to be flippant about it. But, but you know, what is the borders are? I think it's a, it's an important question to ask. What type of power are the people who were responsible for family separations now being bestowed?
It's unclear because just like family separation had never happened, the Trump administration is setting up additional parts of an immigration enforcement apparatus in a way that they've never been structured before. Forgive me for interrupting you.
DINGMAN: No, quite all right. Well, the only thing I would add to that is as Jonathan White says towards the end of the film in the wake of this scandal, Congress took no action to prevent a policy like this from going into effect ever again.
SOBOROFF: There's nothing to stop them from doing it again. Congress as Jonathan white says in the film, despite numerous displays of moral histrionics about this policy has never enacted a law that would ban the practice of family separation outright. And we're seeing it again today. What is mass deportation? A mass deportation is just family separation by another name?
You mentioned Homan. He told Cecilia Vega on “60 minutes” that if families didn't want to get separated, the American citizen children, and there are millions of them in this country of undocumented parents, can leave the country with their parents. Just think about that for a minute. It's not being developed in secret. This is their stated goal. This is what they want to do and it's a super-sized version of family separation.
