Setting the Wrong Standard: A Review of Separated:

Jacob Soboroff, NBC News and MSNBC correspondent brilliantly narrates his relentless pursuit of the truth behind the Trump administration’s family separation policy in Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. From 2017 to 2019, Soboroff covered “the greatest human-rights catastrophe” on American soil, uncovering the systematic separation of migrant families at the US-Mexico border, which had become the official policy of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).¹ The author’s experience brings a personal element to his fact-based reporting, which skillfully incorporates sources from the DHS, Office of Refugee Resettlement, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Health and Human Services (HHS), and global immigration-focused nonprofits. This book’s success comes from Soboroff’s ability to turn reporting into storytelling, all while keeping a tenacious focus on the policy itself. Influencing the Trump administration’s policy reversal to end family separations in June 2018, his work is a call for us to ask difficult questions and to challenge the answers we cannot accept.²

From the Casa Padre detention center in Brownsville, Texas to the Adelanto US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing center in California, Soboroff’s analytical account takes readers into the spaces where cameras were not allowed, revealing the inhumane conditions administration officials brazenly denied. The author makes clear that the pain endured by child migrants and their families was a “self-inflicted American tragedy” put into action over a year before the DHS officially adopted a zero tolerance immigration policy.³ Throughout the book, Soboroff shows that CBP officers continually contradicted President Trump’s rhetoric that drugs and gang members were entering the country illegally, revealing that “catching MS-13 members . . . was like finding a needle in the haystack.”⁴ While Trump drastically slashed the number of refugee admissions, the Central American migration crisis continued to swell. Driven by widespread violence and legal impunity of gangs, extreme poverty, and lack of economic opportunity fueled by environmental degradation, migrants continued to flee their homes despite the uncertainty of making it to America. Soboroff’s work is only a snapshot of what 470,000 Central American asylum seekers brave in their search for safety, many of them escaping the violent criminal activity in which Trump and his associates believed these same individuals were involved.⁵

The author traces the story of Juan and José, a father and son from Petén, Guatemala, where Los Zetas had threatened their lives. Though having a legitimate claim for asylum, they were separated without ever being able to say good-bye to one another and were transported thousands of miles away from one another. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen created thousands of orphans “with the stroke of her pen” and then repeatedly denied the existence of the policy she had put into place.⁶ The migrants who risked their lives to trek over 2,000 miles through hostile terrain were not even an afterthought, a dangerous precedent for a country with unmatched global influence to set.

Exemplifying the power of good journalism, Soboroff allows facts to point to those who must be held accountable for the pain endured by migrant children and their families––the individuals of the Trump administration who knew the psychological trauma their policy would cause. Commander Jonathan White of the US Public Health Service, who had advocated against family separations, testified before a House of Representatives subcommittee that “there’s no question that separation of children from parents entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child.”⁷ As the world watched the champion of human rights rip at least 5,556 children from their parents with no plan for reunification, Commander White stated the obvious. Even when the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) condemned the policy for being an “arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life” and “a serious violation of the rights of the child,” the evasion of responsibility continued.⁸ In a statement following the accusation, former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley wrote, “While the High Commissioner’s office ignorantly...