The new documentary by Errol Morris called Separated, which is considered a likely Academy Awards contender for Best Documentary, was made with the plan to share it with the public before the election. The main point of the film is to remind people of the cruel fiasco that was the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policy during his presidency: forcibly separating parents from children as a deterrent to illegal immigration along the southern border of the United States.
Trump makes clear in an interview clip shown in the documentary that he intends to revive the sadistic policy if he’s reelected. And the mess his administration made is still with us. According to Separated, an estimated four-thousand-plus families were traumatized for life by the way children were removed and incarcerated. Even toddlers were sometimes held in literal cages for months at a time before the policy was overturned because of the public outcry and eventual legal action.
But there are still over a thousand children who have never been reunited with their parents. Because the policy was being implemented so chaotically, with the separations occurring at such a rapid rate in such horrifying numbers, and record-keeping was deliberately impeded, it became almost impossible to locate the parents of certain children later on.
As one government employee working for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, charged with reuniting families, puts it, “When you ask a two-year-old child what their mother’s name is, they say, ‘Mom.’”
Currently running in theaters in very limited release, meaning New York City and Los Angeles, Separated won’t play widely until it premieres on MSNBC on December 9, over a month after the election. This decision was reportedly made “in part because NBC bosses don’t want to offend Donald Trump.”
Director Morris has aired his grievances about the release on public media:
That [decision] rankled Morris, who
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Auteur: Eileen Jones
