Errol Morris Takes On Trump Adm. Family Separation Policy in New Film

Of all the policies implemented by the Trump administration, the most outrageous – at least to many critics – was Family Separation.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, for one, doesn’t mince words in his assessment of it.

“The policy, when you really look at it square in the face, is appalling,” Morris tells Deadline. “Not a policy of deterrence, not a policy as some would argue of ‘just following the law,’ whatever that means. A policy of cruelty.”

Morris’s new documentary, Separated, premiering at the Venice Film Festival later today, investigates the Trump administration mandate that ordered the pulling apart of migrant families who crossed the Mexican border into the U.S. Parents were detained and sent for criminal prosecution; their children, taken from them, were detained separately (in cages, or if you prefer, “chain-link enclosures”), under the jurisdiction of the Dept. of Health and Human Services. Some of the children were infants.

The documentary is based on the book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, written by NBC News Political and National correspondent Jacob Soboroff, who spent years covering immigration and the border during the Trump presidency. He serves as an executive producer of the film and appears on camera in it.

“[Trump] certainly allowed, easily — in a way that nobody has ever done before — 5,500 people to be deliberately taken from their parents,” Soboroff says. “And just to emphasize, the American Academy of Pediatrics called it ‘government sanctioned child abuse’ and Physicians for Human Rights, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization, said it met the UN definition of torture. It will go down as one of the most shameful chapters in modern American history, if not [all of] American history, for what they did.”

The documentary, a production of NBC News Studios, Participant, Fourth Floor, and Moxie Pictures, takes a forensic approach to identifying how the policy was conceived and carried out, and why. “Zero Tolerance,” the Trump administration’s umbrella term that authorized family separations, was announced in May 2018. Secretly, immigration authorities had been separating migrant families for at least a year beforehand.

“Even before it became quasi-legitimized [in 2018] it was a sort of a covert policy that was being implemented — not advertised — but most certainly being implemented,” Morris says.

Its whole purpose, Separated argues, was to create a situation so devastating and horrifying for migrant families – seeing their children seized from them – that word would get back to Central America and other points of origin of migration, and the result would be a reduction in attempts to cross into the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, was told by government lawyers that the policy might violate the U.S. Constitution, but she signed off anyway.

“The bottom line is they knew exactly what they were doing,” Soboroff maintains. “And as Adam Serwer sort of coined in The Atlantic at the time, ‘the cruelty was the point.’ I say that as, I believe, an objective journalist who saw this with my own eyes.”

Morris, as he has done in many of his other documentaries including The Thin Blue Line, Wormwood, and The Pigeon Tunnel, weaves dramatizations throughout Separated.

“There’s really two movies here. Two movies for the price of one,” he says wryly. “You’re getting a documentary film with interviews of some of the central figures — not the expected figures — but some of the central figures involved in these policies. And you’re also getting a dramatic film with actors telling the story of at least one representative family making its way from Central America across the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States.”

Actress Gabriela Cartol plays a mom who makes the dangerous journey north with her son, a boy of perhaps 10.

“The narrative portion of the film, to me, is almost my favorite part of this,” says Soboroff, “because Errol is so masterfully able to document the emotional truth that, outside of speaking to families themselves, you would never understand what it’s like to take that journey to get here and then only to be faced with… the hand of the person that you think of as your savior, then doing to you the most unspeakable thing that you could possibly imagine, which is ripping your family apart for no reason other than to hurt you.”

A little over a month after announcing the family separation policy in 2018, Pres. Trump abandoned it. Public outrage, to a large degree bipartisan, forced his hand. “He reversed the policy in late June 2018,” Soboroff says, “with the executive order because he didn’t like the sights and the sounds on television, one could assume… of children being separated. For him, it was a superficial reason, not a moral reason.”

Morris chimes in, “He didn’t like the optics!”

Separated doesn’t let the Democratic Party off the hook. The film begins with audio of Pres. Clinton, Pres. George W. Bush, Pres. Obama and Pres. Biden all talking tough on immigration. As noted in the film, the Obama administration considered implementing a family separation policy but rejected the idea (it did build cage-like enclosures in which some migrant children were housed – either in cases where the parents could not care for their kids, or the parents were suspected of serious crimes).

Soboroff says the whole thrust of U.S. immigration enforcement policy has been punitive and not humanitarian. Former Pres. Trump, in the midst of a campaign to return to the White House, is running on a promise to deport millions of undocumented people in the U.S. And, if he is elected, family separation could be revived.

“The spirit of the family separation policy is alive and well in Republican politics today,” Soboroff asserts, “but Democrats have not done enough to make it so that they couldn’t bring it back if they wanted to.”

The legacy of family separation is still with us. According to the Dept. of Homeland Security, more than a thousand children separated from their parents because of Trump administration policy still have not been reunited with their families.

“As we would all acknowledge, it’s a set of very complex issues [around immigration],” Morris says. “But we do know that our government’s response to it is shameful. We should be ashamed of what happened, and we should seek that it’s not repeated ever again.”