‘Separated’ trailer: Errol Morris documentary sheds light on migrant families torn apart at U.S.-Mexico border
MSNBC Films and Submarine Deluxe is set to premiere “Separated,” a new documentary from Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, December 7 on MSNBC. The film confronts one of the darkest chapters in recent American history: family separations. Based on NBC News Political and National Correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy,” Morris merges bombshell interviews with government officials and artful narrative vignettes tracing one migrant family’s plight. Together they show that the cruelty at the heart of this policy was its very purpose. Against this backdrop, audiences can begin to absorb the U.S. government’s role in developing and implementing policies that have kept over 1,300 children without confirmed reunifications years later, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Watch the trailer above.
“Separation from your parent is a profoundly traumatizing event,” we hear in the trailer. “Systematic separation of children from parents ‘officially’ wasn’t happening, but it was happening.” In an interview clip with Soboroff he reveals, “Their version of stopping people from coming into the country was taking children away from their parents so that people wouldn’t come. What zero tolerance did was turn their helpers into their worst nightmare. The government thought that showing the world separations through the eyes of people like me, they would scare the shit out of people that were attempting to come from coming.”
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In a press release the film studio states, “While immigration policy has been a core issue since the United States was founded, recent years have seen the debate heat up in unprecedented ways. In particular, the Trump administration’s hard-line stance on immigration resulted in a series of devastating policies that affected thousands of people over the four-year presidency, many of which continue to have repercussions for some of the country’s most vulnerable populations. But in the summer of 2018, one of those political calculations would prove shockingly cruel even by the Administration’s own standards, bringing about one of the most shameful and morally reprehensible chapters in the history of the United States: the family separation policy.”
In an apparent effort to deter immigration, mostly from Central America, the Trump administration enabled the Department of Homeland Security to separate migrant parents from their children—some of them infants—upon being apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. ACLU estimates about 5,500 children were taken from their parents while the policy was implemented. Despite ongoing efforts, not all of the families affected have been reunified.
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Since his days working at Pivot, the former television network owned and operated by Participant, California-based journalist Jacob Soboroff has reported on immigration issues and life across the U.S.-Mexico border. Upon transitioning to NBC News, Soboroff dug deep into the issue, reporting on a series of hour-long programs dedicated to finding answers about the Trump administration’s claims about the situation at the border by traveling there and investigating firsthand. Those experiences put Soboroff in the privileged position to become an eyewitness to the family separations that were, at first, only rumored to be occurring.
Covering in real time—and having access to the dehumanizing facilities where migrant children were kept—he found himself horrified at what he was witnessing. “Even though I was there, and even though I saw it myself, and even though I was inside those facilities, and I met a number of families that went through it, and I talked to a number of officials who were responsible for it, I still couldn’t comprehend how the U.S. government could do something so deliberately cruel,” expressed Soboroff. According to Soboroff, the family separations under President Trump were made possible because the U.S. government, under both Democrat and Republican leadership, has long designed our immigration system to be punitive in order to scare people away from immigrating.
Morris’ interest in the story of family separations came at a point when enough had been reported about the situation at the border that Trump administration officials who had been actively involved in the policy refused to speak with Morris, afraid of the repercussions. “I approached a lot of people to be interviewed and was just repeatedly turned down again and again, and again,” said Morris. “I kept running into brick walls.”
One key figure in the implementation of the policy, Kirstjen Nielsen, the former United States Secretary of Homeland Security, was among those who wouldn’t talk to Morris, even though she was out of office at the time he approached her. There were others he reached out to who were still involved in the machinery of immigration and weren’t allowed to speak without the explicit permission of their superiors. At every turn of the process, Morris encountered more and more bureaucratic red tape.
“I’ve never really quite encountered something like this. It’s very odd to be making a movie in the middle of things as they’re happening,” said Morris. “At least this kind of a movie, which depends on putting people in a chair, having them talk to me, or talk to camera.”
At times, the frustration pushed Morris to consider abandoning the project, but his strong commitment to Soboroff, who trusted him with the material, compelled him to stay the course. “I learned a lot about government bureaucracy, more than almost anything else in the making of this film,” Morris expressed. “How deeply bureaucratic it all is, particularly the Department of Homeland Security, which is a kind of monstrosity created after 9/11.”
“Separated” is directed and produced by Errol Morris, with additional producers Robert Fernandez, Molly O’Brien and Steven Hathaway. The documentary had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August, which was followed by a screening at the Telluride Film Festival in September.
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