‘Separated,’ a warning from the past and a roadmap for the future of US immigration

It should never have happened, but those who harbored a vision of it made sure it did. The separation of migrant families during Donald Trump’s first presidency was one of the biggest scandals of a turbulent administration. The images of hundreds of children, including infants, crammed into literal cages after being torn from their mothers and fathers proved impossible for the public to digest and the then-president eventually signed an executive order to end the policy. It is one of the few occasions that Trump rescinded.

The documentary Separated, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris and based on a book by NBC journalist Jacob Soboroff, delves into the sequence of events and decisions that co-opted the institutions and shaped a policy described as cruel and deliberate. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in late August, but has been in few theaters since, although it did air exclusively last Saturday on the US channel MSNBC.

This week, the documentary was screened for the first time below the southern border, in Mexico City — an important moment for the filmmakers given the subject matter. The hour-and-a-half-long documentary — which combines interviews with officials who fought against the separations and fictional scenes that depict the journey of a mother and son from Guatemala to their eventual separation after crossing the border — acts as a warning and a chilling roadmap for the president-elect.

Keeping what happened alive in people’s memories was Soboroff’s main aim, he said after the film’s screening. Too many people were too quick to forget those harrowing images. But now, with Trump’s win and his promise to carry out the largest deportation in history, the exercise has morphed into a very relevant warning.

“Deportation is family separation by another name, and it’s not separating children from their parents at the border, it’s taking parents away from their children inside the country, in their schools, in their jobs, in their homes. And we’re not talking about 5,500 this time [the highest estimate of children separated from their parents in Trump’s first term]. We’re talking about 20 million people living with an undocumented family member in their home,” explains Soboroff, who remains hopeful that documenting how this operation was orchestrated will serve to prepare those determined to fight a further, even crueler, round.

The film is forensic in its presentation of the facts. Combining news clips with internal emails from numerous U.S. government agencies and interviews with crucial actors — some against their will — the documentary gives the impression of sitting in on a trial. And the star witness is Jonathan White, who was working for the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the time. After an exposé showing how the separation of families was secretly planned from the beginning of Trump’s presidency in 2017 with the express goal of deterring migrants, White explains: “It happened months before there was an express policy. And it was happening while my own bosses were saying no.”

Central to the whole scandal was the transparent cruelty of the practice, which prompted figures such as the Pope to speak out against it. When Trump backtracked, he admitted he didn’t like how the separations looked and felt, Soboroff recalls, though “he didn’t say he was morally opposed to the separations.”

The moment when Trump put an end to family separations is shown in the documentary, and it’s hard not to see a president signing a document against his will. Throughout the film, it is made clear that this cruelty was premeditated, as White puts it. The logic being, without cruelty there is no deterrence.

Amid this banal cruelty — in the midst of officials and policemen who obey orders and those who give them but keep their hands clean — emerge a few voices of hope. One is that of White, indignant at being forced to go against his conscience in providing care for unprotected children, which he considered his ultimate responsibility. Another is that of Jallyn Sualog, who worked for the same entity.

According to the documentary, Sualog was the first to realize what was happening because her office started receiving more and more children who were too young to be crossing the border unaccompanied. The only conclusion to be reached was that they were being separated from their families and turned over to her agency in a deliberately opaque process. She began to make a detailed list which would end up being the determining factor in reuniting families, though data wasn’t easy to come by since, as she points out, “when you ask a three-year-old what their mommy’s name is, they say, ‘mommy.’”

To date, there are around 1,400 orphans in the U.S. created by the state. In some cases, the parents have been lost; in others, they have been deported. There may even be some who are together, Soboroff says, but are afraid to say so in case they are expelled from the country. No one wants to go through that kind of trauma again.

And yet, a repeat of this separation is looking increasingly inevitable. The architects of the original operation are back with a thirst for revenge and will occupy important positions within the future Trump administration. These include anti-immigration hawk Stephen Miller, appointed White House deputy chief of staff for policy, and Tom Homan, the new “border czar.” Eight years on, the protagonists of U.S. immigration policy are the same, only now they are more experienced and have more power than ever after the Republicans secured majorities in both houses, not to mention a sympathetic Supreme Court.

Once again, White’s words sum it up, sending a chill down the spine. “If you believe that immigrants are an existential threat to the American way of life, and I do believe that’s how some of these people think, then when you’ve applied all the ordinary things that the law allows, all that’s left is to do something extraordinarily cruel. And that’s what happened here.”

The hope is that in Trump’s second term, even though his power and experience has increased, many more individuals like White and Sualog will step forward and there will be more heroes than torturers.

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