Torn Apart

Kidnapping children to punish parents is a mythic kind of barbarity. A witch places a curse on a family’s favorite daughter. An evil dragon devours the firstborn babe of the king. It’s biblical: damning the son for the sins of the father. It’s what crime syndicates do: threatening the bodily integrity of a beloved as “incentive” for a debtor to cough up ransom. We view such bargaining as criminal when extracted by humans—and even when the threat is issued by the gods.

What, then, to make of a constitutional democracy that builds such a payment scheme into its very system of justice? What to make of a political regime that explicitly designs an immigration policy for removing children from parents just to “disincentivize” future migrants from seeking asylum within its borders? That, of course, is the essence of the “zero tolerance” child separation program begun under President Donald Trump. While unaccompanied children had been detained by previous administrations, children arriving with their families had not been routinely taken from their parents unless those parents represented a threat to their health or welfare. And never before in our history had there been an actual policy of removal devised simply as theatrical cruelty that might serve to frighten other migrants from coming here.

This policy is the subject of Separated, a scorching, heartbreaking film made by Errol Morris and scheduled to be released on MSNBC on December 7. (It was screened at one theater in New York City for one week in October in order to qualify it for Oscar consideration.)

The documentary is based on the firsthand television reports of the journalist Jacob Soboroff, for which he won the Walter Cronkite Award, and which he turned into a book, Separated, published in 2020. The book follows the plight of a family seeking asylum in the United States after fleeing their home in the Petén region of Guatemala because of death threats from narcotics gangs. Shortly after presenting themselves at the border, they were separated: Juan, the father, was held in California; José, his fourteen-year-old son, was sent to south Texas. It was months before they saw each other again. This is a process that was repeated thousands of times, imprisoning even very young children, toddlers, and babies.

Between 2017 and 2020 at least 5,500 children were taken away and scattered all over the country, some in literal warehouses or repurposed big-box stores, some in “tent cities,” some sent into haphazardly contracted foster care, some simply lost. The true number may never be known because the records were so poorly kept. This was intentional: political appointees like Scott Lloyd, acting head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), had directed staff to not keep lists of the children and to “get rid of” those lists they did have. Among the various agencies involved, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security, and ORR, there was no cross-coordination and no central database of separations. And ICE opposed, blocked, and delayed reunification even in cases where parents had been processed through the judicial system. Today it is estimated that more than a thousand families have still not been reunited.

The true heroes of Morris’s film are the career government workers: people like ORR’s Commander Jonathan White, an earnest social worker who remains passionate and insistent about the responsibility of his office and of the government to protect children first and foremost. In the early days of the first Trump administration, when there were still official denials that a child separation policy even existed, it was White’s office that decided to map the startling and suddenly rising numbers of separated children. It was the follow-up data-gathering of White and other career employees that ultimately held the president’s feet to the fire, leading to official acknowledgment and then termination of the program in late 2018.

Perhaps to an even greater degree than Soboroff’s book, Morris’s film is clear about the wretched inhumanity of the political appointees (like Lloyd and Kirstjen Nielsen, the former head of Homeland Security) who acted as obedient yes-men and -women to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, ORR director Thomas Homan, and senior adviser Stephen Miller; they masterminded the most abusive policies with heartless efficiency.

Given the disparagement of immigrants by Trump, J.D. Vance, Miller, and a chorus of Republican proxies, it is worth reminding ourselves that asylum seekers are not criminals. Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees that “everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from political persecution.” Although the right to asylum may not apply to those seeking protection from nonpolitical threats, that determination is supposed to be made as part of the resolution of the claim. It is legally necessary to come into a country or to present yourself at one of its ports of entry to make a claim for protective status.

Since 2017, however, the United States has severely restricted people’s ability to get into the country, particularly through the southern border. Under Trump, a system was instituted whereby you could not claim asylum in the US if you had first passed through another country without having applied for asylum there and been turned down. If you are fleeing Nicaragua on foot and heading north, in other words, you must first have sought asylum in the countries in between—in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico—and been denied by each before you can move on to apply in the US. This was an unprecedented innovation that was struck down by courts. But under President Biden, a newer version, called Circumvention of Lawful Pathways, has been put into place.

Making matters worse, in 2023 Biden severely restricted the right to present yourself for asylum even at lawful ports of entry. Instead, noncitizens must first ask for an appointment to present themselves at a land point of entry, using the “CBP One” smartphone app. This is patently “not feasible for some people,” according to Ana Piquer, the Americas Director of Amnesty International.^* Moreover, the app is a very limited scheduling tool, granting appointments on a supposedly first come, first served basis that limits the number of applications that can be registered in a day. There is no allowance for urgent circumstance. The wait for an appointment can be up to nine months, according to the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Those waiting for their claims to be heard live in destitution; tent cities have sprung up along Mexico’s northern border that are devoid of basic services, generating squalor, desperation, and violence. Once applicants are finally granted an appointment for entry, scheduling an actual asylum hearing can take four years or longer—and in the end, all but very few applicants are rejected.

Another thing to bear in mind is that Trump’s policy of child removal was justified on the circular grounds that even legitimate asylum seekers are trespassers just by stepping onto US soil. So the universal human right to seek asylum was itself rebranded as a crime. This criminalization of asylum seeking, aggressively pursued by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, was one asserted justification for separating families. The logic is very different from the post–World War II immigration policies that preceded Trump, under which people could be prosecuted for a variety of civil improprieties but were not rendered criminal by an a priori presumption against their being potential asylum seekers. Rather, they would be processed, given a hearing date, then allowed to remain in the country until their status was formally determined. Trump has disparaged this system—known since the Bush administration as “catch and release”—diminishing the people at our borders as game or prey, “caught” but then foolishly “released” into untraceably deep waters, depicting migrants as some sort of invasive species.

By August 2017 Jonathan White and some other career employees in the ORR were noticing an unusually sharp uptick in the numbers of child separations and detentions. Yet Trump officials publicly denied that separations were happening—although we now know that hundreds of children had already been taken away from their parents. Beginning in 2018 there was an official reversal of any presumption in favor of asylum; “catch and release” was replaced by “zero tolerance.” The administration closed the Family Case Management Program that had redirected and protected asylum-seeking mothers and their children from detention. Migrants now had the burden of proving they were not “unlawful”—a nearly impossible task without money or lawyers. Once paralyzed with that burden, they could be held indefinitely, and the presumption of criminalized status became justification for family separation.

One father who ended up separated from his three-year-old son had been turned down for his initial asylum interview; he was facing a final order of removal but had not yet been deported. He and his son had turned themselves in at the border, stating that they wished to seek asylum:

Shortly after arriving, I was told that I was going to be separated from my son. There were no doubts expressed that I was my son’s biological father and I have a birth certificate to show our relationship. I also had my son’s vaccination records and his passport. They did not tell me I was a danger to my son or was abusive. They told me that they had to separate me from my son because I had a prior removal order.

He and his son were sent to separate detention facilities and for months had only sporadic telephone communication.

Other parents were not even given advance warning. Some were simply told their children were being taken “for a bath,” though they were never returned. Very young children who were separated sometimes did not know their parents’ names—toddlers, for example, could only ask for “mom.”

When the child separation policy was finally acknowledged in 2018, the Trump administration filled the headlines with stories of “illegals” who broke the law by “invading”—essentially breaking and entering and endangering the nation. Contagion and the need for containment dominated the narrative. Trump, then as now, denied that immigrants are human: “These aren’t people; these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.” In the updated version of this rhetoric, in 2024, he has added the Hitlerian embellishments of “vermin,” “poison,” “garbage,” and “bad genes.”

The child separation program was conceived from the beginning as a disincentivizing system of displayed torture: See what happens to those who disobey? The cruelty of this stance was exploited endlessly, Sessions even declaring it biblically ordained by the Pauline Epistle Romans 13. (This passage posits that obeying the government is a godly obligation; it was notoriously used by white Southern planters to defend both the laws of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act.) Yet as more and more of the career officials at the ORR grew apprehensive about the increasing rate at which children were disappearing, Trump and his senior advisers defended the policy, speaking with much moral opprobrium of those who would “disrespect” the law.

Then as now, a distressingly large percentage of the American public chimed in: “They broke the law.” “What did they expect?” “It’s on the parents.” Some have rationalized the policy by saying that whenever any parent is put behind bars they are separated from their children—overlooking several basic facts: even an incarcerated parent does not lose all contact with their child; incarcerated US citizens who are parents have been publicly charged, publicly tried, and publicly convicted of a crime; these parents know where their child is; and the child is not also incarcerated, or subjected to the severe physical and linguistic isolation that marked the treatment of the children “separated” by Trump and his enablers.

But this glib exoneration of government action disguises a long list of human rights abuses—whose gravity is amplified by Trump officials’ calculation in lying about the existence of the practice and the seriousness of the harm done. Children were heedlessly yanked from their parents, placed in metal and concrete pens, with few to no mechanisms or records to reunite them—violating every precept of fairness, due process, individual autonomy, and personal responsibility. Of all the disruptive horrors of the Trump administration, child separation was the worst. It was a project of intentional kidnapping, intentionally inflicted death and despair.

According to the National Institutes of Health, the harm resulting from this sort of trauma will endure a lifetime, for both parents and children. Long-term studies of child removal show that even when families are separated for the noblest of reasons, harm persists: children who were sent to the north of England to avoid the London Blitz fared worse mentally than those who stayed with their parents throughout the war. And the rate of failure to thrive among children who are raised in foster care is all too well documented. Most of the people presenting themselves at our borders are traumatized to begin with, fleeing war-like conditions and deadly threats in their home countries. Child separation on top of that is a cruelty that breaks the human spirit utterly.

Particularly in children, such deep trauma damages the cells of the brain, gene structure, and cognitive development. It’s associated with long-term mental disorders including suicidal ideation, dissociative personality disorder, inability to concentrate, PTSD, chronic nightmares, lowered IQ, and depression. The stress of separation leaves physical susceptibilities to dyspraxia, heart disease, certain cancers, and stunted growth.

At least five children died in detention between 2018 and 2019. Physicians for Human Rights called Trump’s child separation policy “torture.” The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics called it “government-sanctioned child abuse.” And the policy violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as…punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person…when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

The United States is a signatory to this convention; disgracefully, however, it is not a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which specifically establishes a child’s right to be raised by family.

For Juan and his son José, this is an unfinished saga. Happily, they have been reunited and are living in the US until their asylum claims are processed. Those claims, which will be adjudicated separately, were, as of 2021, part of a case backlog that may keep them waiting for more than three years with no particular end in sight.

Any degree of alarm and public outcry that initially attended the discovery of this orphan-production system seems to have subsided during the Biden years—even as Trump promises to reinstate more sweeping systems of punishment and displacement. “Mass deportation!” he promises gleefully. “Millions and millions” will be put in “camps” and then systematically deported to…somewhere. He also declares his intention to lock up broadly defined “enemies from within,” even using military force to do so. (This would require suspending the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement.) Most ominously, he has stated his intention to deploy the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law that was last invoked to intern Japanese, Italian, and German citizens during World War II. Indeed, Trump’s insistent characterization of migrants as armed “invaders,” “alien” outlaws, and murderous “predators” is not accidental: he seems to be warming up his base for radical wartime action by deploying the language of the act, whose metric for invocation is precisely “invasion” and “predatory incursion.”

The discourse of mass deportation has, over time, become more explicitly violent. In addition, Trump, Vance, and the entire Republican Party seem to have recycled antebellum race science as well as the American Eugenics Society’s idea of citizenship as dependent on the particulars of supposedly biologically inherited cultural characteristics—like “good genes” or “high IQ” or Americanness itself. Trump’s racially freighted language of “shit-hole” countries evokes amorphous notions of whiteness as a default national identity, recalling nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Supreme Court cases that justified disenfranchising African Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. This language has entered mainstream political discourse on both the right and the left. No politician can escape being mired in the renewed rhetorical conceits of America’s worst episodes of jingoism and manifest destiny. We are all struggling to address the divisiveness Trump has planted, for our very language has been corrupted: “intelligence” has been used as a dog whistle for whiteness; lines between insiders and outsiders have been drawn so as to maximize fears of “white genocide”; and claims to blood and soil have been unleashed, sounding very like the configuring of an ethnostate.

This astonishing discourse about who is “out of place” harks back to the “colonization” movement of deporting freed slaves to Africa, as well as cases leading up to Chinese and East Indian exclusion and delineations of the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” Trumpism has reshaped the Republican Party into a force that threatens to discriminate among immigrants based on racial, religious, and national identity; and the Supreme Court has paved the way by its allowance of supposedly neutral yet targeted rhetoric in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), giving him a pass on whether, despite his explicit Islamophobia, he can bar the admission of people from Muslim-majority nations. This time around, the more recent Supreme Court case Trump v. United States (2024) will grant him a carte blanche of immunity against prosecution for a breathtaking range of criminal action. It remains to be seen who exactly he might decide to shoot in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

Trump’s rhetoric is particularly insidious for its citation of racial and national origins as grounds for whole-group exclusion. Moreover, he has promised to charge with sedition or revoke the citizenship of those he deems “traitors” (which includes flag burners), and he is among those Republicans who would endorse the disenfranchisement of “anchor babies” by revoking the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of birthright citizenship. And while the exuberantly natalist nativism of Trump, Vance, Musk, et al is beginning to be identified with its Nazi antecedents, I worry that the deep roots of such ideas in the American Eugenics Movement remain quite underappreciated. Most public denunciation of this recent effusion of “pure-blooded” identitarianism tends to frame the problem as a revival of something that existed in the long ago, or that is “foreign” in its fascism, or that is suddenly now being resurrected “out of nowhere”—or nowhere but Trump’s ruffian vulgarity. Yet Trump’s words do not appeal to the broad range of his base just because of Mein Kampf. The reemergence of nostalgic identity formations around “trad wives” or masculinity as defined by the golfer Arnold Palmer’s displayed “manhood” (gulp!) are updated examples of early-twentieth-century contests for Better Babies and Fitter Families.

I have wandered a bit from Errol Morris’s film. But I recommend both it and Soboroff’s book as a refresher, a necessary reacquaintance with the cunning, almost fairy-tale cruelties that have transformed American politics of late. It’s particularly hard to talk about immigration, racism, any aspect of identity, or our vision of citizenship when nearly half of America seems to think that “social justice” actually means “group entitlements,” or that “racial justice” really means “racial favoritism,” or that the word “inclusion” is to be read as meaning “restricted speech and justification for purges.”

It’s like Through the Looking-Glass, where everything is backward, inside-out, and nonsensical. This kind of well-funded, well-organized propaganda is very hard to speak through, around, over. I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel of constant and cynically shifting redefinition, always on the unwinnable defensive: No, I don’t hate all white people. No, I do not drink the blood of Good Christians’ puppies and their delicious kittens. No, I am not a Marxist pedophile. The perpetual fantastical upside-downness unsettles meaning, trust, sanity.

And it hardens us. The idea that there was not a clear moral choice in this election requires either an ignorance of or identification with how Trump identifies himself. I am under no illusion that Harris might have untangled this mess of a world, or that she is perfect. But wherever the resentments and confusion of our present culture war take us, he is a cruel man who supports sadistic policies and seems to find humor in and derive pleasure from doing so.

I cannot give much time to arguments that Vice President Harris was no better than Trump. I do not believe that she would have federally deputized the National Guard, local sheriffs, and other law enforcement to conduct “large scale raids” for suspected migrants across the country and then round them up, separate parents from children, and intern them indefinitely as Trump promises to do. I do not believe that Harris would have criminalized homeless people and disappeared them from “our” streets as Trump proposes to do. If deporting millions or erecting massive tent cities or disappeared large numbers of people in this fashion sounds unlikely, then again, I suggest you think back to the architecture that is already in place—the practice run that was our “zero tolerance” policy of child separation. That dragon ate toddlers for breakfast. Imagine the appetite it might have for punishing all the others who have been characterized as poisoning the nation’s blood: the “losers,” “globalists,” “animals,” “woke academics,” “crooked media,” “fraudsters,” “fat, ugly” people, demons, devils, and entire demographics of humanity for whom his slurs are not enough.

—November 6, 2024