Separated

NOW ON VOD! As a parent and just as a human being, I can tell you that purposefully separating children from their parents is cruel and unusual punishment. Adding to that is that a good portion of these families are asylum seekers who are just trying to keep their kids out of gangs, poverty, violence, and drugs in their native countries but instead face a new nightmare in the “land of the free,” where their children are imprisoned and alone. Legendary documentary director Errol Morris, based on a book from reporter Jacob Soboroff, tackles the controversial subject of kids being ripped away from their families by the US government in the documentary Separated.

The film starts out with Captain Jonathan White, a career social worker, and Deputy Director for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), making his first public statements and how he chose this line of work in order to be able to do good. We then see President Donald Trump talking about building his border wall in order to keep immigrants out. Next is a clip of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly on CNN stating that he is considering separating children from their parents at the border as a deterrent to illegal immigration.

“…kids being ripped away from their families by the US government…”

White, along with some reenactments by actors, explains how there are some asylum-seeking families (predominantly from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) who send their children unaccompanied to the United States in order to escape the aforementioned dangerous situations. The film goes down the rabbit hole of all of the players involved such as Scott Lloyd (who is interviewed here), and how the Trump Administration was secretly separating families and lying to the press about it, but were exposed by people like White who noticed the facilities that housed unaccompanied children filling up more than tenfold of what it had been before, along with being filled with toddlers and infants who were too young to walk or speak, so there is no way that they would be able to travel alone.

I can recall at the time of this scandal, people were spreading misinformation online that the family separation actually started with Obama. The film clarifies that someone in the Obama Administration brought up the idea, but it was quickly shot down as being too cruel to consider. Errol shows just how cruel it was, yet like Nazi Germany, this nightmare still became a reality, and the documentary shows Trump saying that if he is re-elected, he would like to bring the policy back.