Book Review: “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy”
By: Dr. Thomas J. West Iii
Tags: Books, Borders, Trump, Immigration, Politics

Book Review: “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy”

Given the constant onslaught of outrage and norm-breaking from the Trump White House — including, most recently and devastatingly, the failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic — it’s not surprising that many people have already managed to forget about the family separation policy that caused so much tragedy and trauma just two years ago. Americans have a notorious problem with amnesia, and the fact that over 70 million people still voted for Donald J. Trump suggests that either they managed to forget the cries of separated children or, more sinisterly, that they simply didn’t see such a moral outrage as disqualifying.

Fortunately for those of us who wish to understand more about this policy, what led to it, how it happened, and what’s happened afterward, there is Separated: Inside An American Tragedy, by NBC journalist Jacob Soboroff. As someone who was on the ground as the horror unfolded, he brings a poignant and human perspective to what could, in the hands of a less-talented writer, have been an abstract portrait of human suffering. Instead, we journey with him into the heart of these detention centers, watching as children struggle to adapt

Most damningly, as Soboroff points out again and again, this was a policy that was implemented knowing how much harm it would cause. In fact, it’s precisely because it was understood that separating parents and children that it proved so popular among members of the administration. Unfortunately, their enthusiasm for cruelty was unmatched by expertise, and it wasn’t long before the system was swamped. Some people didn’t know what others were doing, and information systems didn’t communicate effectively (or at all) with one another. As with so many other aspects of the Trump agenda, it was

Though I remember watching Soboroff’s in-depth coverage on MSNBC, reading all of this again made me fume with rage and righteous indignation at those who were responsible for these heinous acts of human cruelty. While Trump was the catalyst for this entire affair — he was so determined to fulfill his campaign promise to crack down on immigration that he didn’t much care how things were done, so long as they were done — he was aided and abetted by a rogues’ gallery of amoral actors who not only knew exactly what they were doing but reveled in it. There was Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, who had the gall to use scripture to justify ripping children away from their parents. There was Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who signed the policy into effect and bent over backward to make sure that it was enforced and that she stayed in Trump’s good graces (to no avail, as it turned out). And there was Katie Waldman, deputy press secretary for Nielsen who is, at times, shockingly transparent about the fact that she has no sense of compassion or empathy for the plight of children separated at the border. No wonder she married Stephen Miller, another of those most responsible for goading Trump into pursuing the most ruthless immigration policy possible.

There are, to be sure, heroes in this book. Some members of the government pushed back against the family separation, noting, rightly, that it would cause tremendous suffering and trauma, both to the parents and to the children. There are the lawyers, particularly those working for the ACLU, who wouldn’t stop fighting until they had forced the government to accept some accountability for what they’d done and, eventually, overturn the policy. And there are the immigrants themselves, the men and women who came to this country fleeing extraordinary danger, only to be met at the border with even more danger, made all the more devastating because this, America, was supposed to be a safe refuge. Soboroff focuses in particular on a father and son, Juan and José, whose deeply heartbreaking personal story stands in for the many others that faced a similar predicament. He allows us to feel their pain and their anguish as they are torn apart and held in centers thousands of miles away from one another, neither given all of the information they needed to know what was going to happen to them and what their choices were. Though their story ends happily, Soboroff makes it clear not not only that they both suffer deep psychic wounds that it will take years to recover from, but that there are many, many others who were not so fortunate.

While a lot of his focus is on the actions of Trump and the rest of his administration, Soboroff also makes it clear that the broken state of the American immigration didn’t start with them, even if they took it to new and increasingly devastating extremes. The fact that it stretches back several decades in American policy-making is both an indictment and a warning. It reminds us that all of us, on both sides of the political divide, bear some responsibility for its failures, and it also reminds us that it is going to take a lot of political will to fix it.

Separated is, at times, a very difficult book to read, just as it was difficult to listen to and watch the crisis unfolding in real time (as an avid watcher of MSNBC, I remember quite vividly the disgust and righteous fury I felt as this humanitarian crisis sprang up in our midst). However, it’s precisely its human dimension that makes it such necessary reading, especially since it can be difficult to keep track of all of the terrible things that have happened under Trump’s regime. After all, he’s taken a wrecking ball to so many of the traditions and institutions that we once took for granted, and every day seems to bring some new horror. For this reason, books like Soboroff’s are invaluable, for they give us a written record of what happened, forcing us to take account of our own culpability in allowing this to come to pass. This is a dark period in our history and, while the policy is supposedly ended, the damage that it needlessly and callously inflicted on those children will endure, a permanent reminder of our collective moral failing.