Brutal Policies

How America Forgot About One of Trump’s Most Brutal Policies

A new documentary from Errol Morris examines how Trump’s family separation policy sparked widespread outrage — and how the government eventually looked the other way.

By Ankush Khardori

Joe Biden called the policy “criminal.” Attorney General Merrick Garland said that he couldn’t “imagine anything worse.” Democrats promised an investigation in the Senate that would hold government officials “responsible for the fundamental human rights violations that they perpetrated.”

The conspicuous displays of moral outrage all concerned one of the most appalling initiatives of the Trump administration — splitting migrant children from their parents — but years later, the political and legal landscape looks very different.

There were no criminal or congressional investigations of the family separation policy after Donald Trump left office. The Justice Department under Garland has done nothing to reprimand or sanction any of the people involved in devising and implementing the policy. And Trump, of course, may be back in office after campaigning on a more aggressively anti-immigration platform than ever before — and promising to deport millions of them if reelected.

How did we get here?

That is one of the questions posed by the film Separated — a methodical and damning new film from the acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris and NBC reporter Jacob Soboroff, who, along with other journalists, has doggedly covered the family separation policy and its fallout. The policy was officially in place for just a few months (April through June 2018) before Trump was forced to back off due to intense public blowback, but during that brief period, the administration managed to separate more than 5,000 children from their families after being apprehended along the southern border.

“There was something different about these policies,” Morris told me in a recent interview with Soboroff about the film. “They were not the same old, same old. They were different in kind. They were new. They were draconian. They were abusive and frightening.”

Even today — despite the yearslong efforts of the Biden administration’s family reunification task force — the government has yet to reunite hundreds of children who were separated under the policy.

The failure to pursue accountability for those involved in the family separation policy remains one of the key pieces of unfinished business from the Trump era — one that both the Biden-Harris administration and the country more broadly have never fully reckoned with.

That failure could ultimately make it easier for a second Trump administration to implement a more draconian immigration crackdown, perhaps including something akin to another family separation policy. Trump has repeatedly contemplated that prospect during the campaign cycle, including in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal editorial board. “It doesn’t sound nice,” he said, “but when a family hears they’re going to be separated, you know what they do? They stay where they are.”

In an awkward turn of events, Separated has itself become caught in the political and media maelstrom of this year’s presidential election.

The film enjoyed a successful run on the festival circuit, is currently in limited release and has been highlighted by trade publications as a potential Oscar contender. But after MSNBC acquired the distribution rights in September, the network announced that it would not air the film until after the election — prompting questions over the delay by Morris himself and eventually a news report indicating that NBC executives had decided to hold the film until after the election in order to avoid offending Trump in the hopes that he might agree to a debate on the network.

Meanwhile, the film’s arrival has prompted once-strident public officials to scatter.

The Biden White House and the Justice Department both declined to comment in response to questions about the movie and the apparent lack of follow-through on the comments made by Biden and Garland before entering office.

Biden, for his part, effectively scuttled a proposed settlement in 2021 that would have provided the impacted families with monetary compensation. At the Justice Department, the only person who was apparently punished in the wake of the policy is a former attorney who leaked a draft of an internal watchdog report in October 2020, evidently worried that it was being buried in the run-up to the presidential election.

As for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s plans to hold hearings, a person familiar with the matter granted anonymity to speak candidly told me that Democrats were hampered by the refusal of Trump administration officials like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to cooperate with their investigation voluntarily, and that they were unable to issue subpoenas because the committee was evenly divided and Republicans wouldn’t go along.

The upshot of all this is clear: “Nothing has happened,” as Soboroff put it to me.

And the table has been set for something even worse to come in the future.

It has become commonplace to describe our immigration system as broken — as a legislative and bureaucratic morass — but Trump’s family separation policy was not business as usual.

That point is driven home in Separated with admirable clarity by Jonathan White, a deputy director in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which manages the placement of unaccompanied minors who have crossed the U.S. border.

The family separation policy, however, was used to separate children who had crossed the southern border with adults. The Justice Department did so under the guise of a “zero tolerance” policy announced by Sessions in April 2018 that required the detention and criminal prosecution of anyone apprehended along the southern border. Adults who were arrested and detained in these cases could not take their kids with them — effectively creating unaccompanied minors who were then quickly and haphazardly moved to separate facilities without clear records that could be used to reunite them with their families later. Separated at one point aptly refers to them as state-created orphans.

“It was often [said] in the media, ‘Well this is what happens anytime anyone gets arrested,’ but that’s not true at all,” White says in the film. “No one inside government believed that. That was solely for the press. … Separation was the purpose. Prosecution was the mechanism.”

The Trump administration, put simply, chose to terrorize innocent children in order to punish their parents and deter future undocumented immigrants.

That fact is underscored in Separated through a series of carefully constructed reenactments that depicts a mother and her young son’s journey across the border and their eventual separation. The boy is then placed in federal custody with little understanding of what has happened or why, and when — if ever — he will see his mother again.

Reenactments are a regular feature of Morris’ documentaries, but at least in this case, there was no other way to convey the reality of the situation to viewers.

“There is no one in my line of work who has actually documented — visually documented — what the separations looked like,” Soboroff told me. “We weren’t allowed to go in those facilities with cameras. Nobody followed those families on some kind of verité journey on the way here, nor once they were separated. That story doesn’t exist in final footage, period.”

Even more damning are the interviews that Morris conducts.

Scott Lloyd, the Trump official who led the Office of Refugee Resettlement and came under significant criticism at the time, comes off particularly poorly — visibly struggling to answer straightforward questions about his role and the warnings about the impact on children that he received in real time from people like White.

At the time of his interview with Lloyd, Morris said that he questioned whether he had actually accomplished anything in speaking with Lloyd. “I thought, ‘This is an utter failure,’” Morris told me. “The guy wouldn’t say anything.” But the awkward silences and evasions speak just as loudly as anything Lloyd could possibly have said in his defense.

Jallyn Sualog, another official in the office at the time, portrays Lloyd during her interview as at best hapless — and at worst wholly complicit in the undertaking. White describes Lloyd as “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history.”

Lloyd, however, at least sat for an interview. Other Trump officials, including Sessions, ducked Morris entirely. The documentarian said that he was also in touch with Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security at the time, but she ultimately refused to sit for an interview.

Another Trump official — Tom Homan, the acting director of ICE at the time of the policy — was actually booked and showed up for an interview with Morris and a film crew, but he bailed at the last minute.

In place of an interview, the film includes a clip of Homan speaking at a conservative political conference about the policy in which he loudly complains about the uproar and summarily dismisses critics of the policy. “Oddly enough,” Morris told me, “I could never have done a better job of revealing his character than he did himself.”

Homan has since promised to reenter the government if Trump is reelected and to “run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.” “They ain’t seen shit yet,” Homan said over the summer. “Wait until 2025.”

He may not be the only former Trump official who participated in the family separation policy who would return in a second Trump administration. Stephen Miller, widely regarded as the principal sponsor of the policy within the Trump White House, remains in Trump’s inner circle and continues to rage wildly on the subject of illegal immigration.

Another, less well-known figure, is Gene Hamilton, who worked as a counselor to Sessions at the time and effectively served as Miller’s counterpart within the Justice Department on the design and execution of the policy. He too could very well return in a second Trump term.

In fact, Hamilton was the author of the chapter in Project 2025 about the Justice Department in a second Trump term — a proposed road map that outlines a sweeping set of changes at the department across a range of issues, including another vigorous, albeit vaguely described, crackdown on illegal immigration.

“Trump seems to me to be a fascist,” Morris told me as we discussed the film and the potential return of the former president, several days before that notion became a dominant issue on the campaign trail.

“I don’t want to use the word lightly,” he continued. “I don’t really believe in analogies in general, but as an American Jew whose family emigrated from Eastern Europe to this country, it’s hard not to see elements of fascism.”

Ahead of a toss-up election, the prospect of another brutal crackdown on illegal immigration — with potentially devastating consequences on the targets and the American communities in which they reside — is undeniable. Trump has talked about a mass deportation program endlessly; Republicans have largely endorsed the notion; and polls have shown robust support for the idea in the abstract.

Perhaps it was unavoidable that Democrats and the broader public would quickly move on from the family separation episode. But this was an instance that was crying out for accountability, regardless of the politics.

In a properly functioning political system, the public would — at a bare minimum — have gotten a real, public excavation of the policy and its impact, and they would have gotten a clear and visceral account both of what actually took place and the harm that the Trump administration actually inflicted.

People like Sessions, Nielsen, Homan and Miller should have been put under oath and forced to answer questions about their disgraceful handiwork, along with less prominent but equally culpable people like Hamilton. Instead, they are all apparently living comfortably — dropping in and out of public life at their choosing and, in several cases, openly positioning themselves to wield even more power if Trump returns to office.

The Justice Department under Garland also failed to meet the moment by forgoing a serious internal accounting or reckoning over how the policy was implemented at the ground level, who was involved and whether they should have participated. There did not need to be a mass purge or firings, but the policy could only have been implemented with line prosecutors and supervisors in the U.S. Attorney’s offices along the southern border who brought the cases and ultimately effectuated the separations. Those people all could (and should) have declined to participate.

In the absence of even a public reprimand under this administration, the department has delivered a troubling signal to the rank-and-file workforce: The rational thing to do — even when asked to participate in a transparently immoral government program — is to follow orders. There will be no meaningful professional consequences over the long term for working as an essential cog in a grotesque legal machine.

It is possible that Trump won’t be able to easily implement another version of the family separation policy if he wins. The American Civil Liberties Union, which led the charge against the policy under the Trump administration, secured a settlement in litigation last year that nominally prevents a future administration from attempting something similar, but there are serious questions about how a second Trump administration would approach the matter. Hamilton’s chapter on the Justice Department in Project 2025 promises to pursue “proactive litigation” to dismantle such settlements, though that is easier said than done.

The likelier risk, perhaps, is an entirely new wave of broad and unilateral executive initiatives in a second Trump term designed to quickly detain and deport as many undocumented immigrants in the country as possible — with potentially devastating effects on the families and the communities in which they reside. It could be brutal and unpleasant in its own way, and maybe it would generate its own public backlash if it came to fruition, but as Separated demonstrates, one major lesson of the family separation policy is that malicious government actors can quickly cause extraordinary and irreparable harm, even if the effort ultimately collapses.

Soboroff, for his part, has struggled to understand how the public and political outrage over the policy so easily dissipated after Biden came into office. He has landed on an unsettling theory.

“This was easy for [the public] to understand,” Soboroff told me, “and there was an easy target in Donald Trump.” But then immigration policy became a “political liability” for the Biden administration, which had no interest in reviving the topic.

Instead of reckoning with the reality of our system — both its failures and its abuses — a large swathe of the public, enabled by the decisions of the political class, would rather look away, with unpredictable and potentially devastating consequences in the future.

“People want to know less,” he said.