Errol Morris’ documentary “Separated” is about an act of cruelty carried out on a massive scale: the forcible division at the US-Mexico border of immigrant parents from their children. It’s illuminating in the most chilling way. Morris’ characteristically cool, analytical approach contains the inherent emotion of the subject matter. Horror arises from the uninflected presentation of information. The movie feels less like a prosecutorial document than an autopsy of a government’s conscience, pinpointing the time of death.
A lot of the movie is about correcting misinformation and obfuscation purveyed by the first Trump administration in presenting the policy to the media and the citizenry. A big one is the insistence that the policy was not new; that it was functionally no different from anything that other presidential administrations had done at the border through the unaccompanied children program, which is part of the Office of Refugee Resettlement; and that it’s ultimately not really any different from what happens to a US citizen with children who gets arrested for a crime and incarcerated.
But as Morris’s movie points out, the unaccompanied children program was intended to help children who had come over the border on their own, without adults, or whose parents had warrants and got arrested by US authorities. It was never meant to deliberately separate parents and children in every family that came over the border, resulting in what is described here as state-created orphans. The Trump administration changed that as part of what it described as a “zero tolerance” policy. The point was to scare anyone thinking of coming to the US without authorization (despite the fact that there have always been laws and due process to deal with such incidents).
The change, says Jonathan White, former Deputy Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, meant that “harm to children would be part of the point. They thought it would terrify families into not coming.” Elaine Duke, former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, says the ORR quickly ran out of “beds for babies” and there are statistics showing a tenfold rise in the number of children being put into the system, often kept in facilities with no beds, out of contact from their parents. “We were very concerned that some children’s separation would be permanent,” Duke says.
White debunks the idea that what happened to parents and children at the border under Trump was no different from a mother or father getting arrested in an American city and put in jail. “When an individual is arrested for a crime, yes, they may be taken away from their child,” White says, “but they know where their child is.” Illegally entering the United States is a misdemeanor that is typically processed in a matter of days, he says, but under Trump there was an effort to get children into what were essentially incarceration facilities more quickly, “before the parents’ processing could be complete,” so that the parents would emerge from the processing having lost their children and being unable to find out what happened to them.
Morris’s mode here is reminiscent of some of the classic documentaries he made in the early aughts, including “The Fog of War” and “Dr. Death,” in that it often leans on graphic elements or abstractions (such as zoetrope cartoons of people crawling through fences) and some re-creations. The latter are shot like an action-adventure movie and are the only stylistically discordant or distracting note; the verbal descriptions of what happened to parents and children, and the voices and faces of the former government officials describing it, are so intensely moving that the dramatizations are putting a hat on top of another hat, so to speak.
But this is a minor complaint in context of what Morris has achieved here. One additional, though admittedly minor, tragedy is that the people most in need of seeing “Separated” will have no interest in it, having already accepted the official version of what happened and why.
Airs on MSNBC tomorrow, December 7th.
