How America Overlooked One of Trump's Most Harsh Policies
A recent documentary by Errol Morris explores the public outcry generated by Trump's family separation policy and how the government ultimately chose to ignore the issue.
TroibNews 
Joe Biden criticized the policy as “criminal,” while Attorney General Merrick Garland expressed he couldn’t “imagine anything worse.” Democrats pledged to investigate in the Senate to hold government officials “responsible for the fundamental human rights violations that they perpetrated.”
The widespread moral outrage was directed at one of the most disturbing initiatives of the Trump administration — the separation of migrant children from their parents. However, the political and legal context has shifted significantly since then.
After Donald Trump exited office, there were no criminal or congressional investigations into the family separation policy. The Justice Department under Garland has taken no steps to reprimand or sanction those who created and enforced the policy. Meanwhile, Trump has been campaigning on a more extreme anti-immigration agenda than ever, vowing to deport millions upon reelection.
How did we arrive at this point?
That question is among several raised by the documentary *Separated* — a thorough and damning work from acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris and NBC reporter Jacob Soboroff, who, along with other journalists, have closely followed the family separation policy and its consequences. Officially in place for only a few months before Trump had to retreat due to public backlash, the administration managed to separate over 5,000 children from their families in that short time after apprehending them at the southern border.
“There was something different about these policies,” Morris explained in a recent interview about the film with Soboroff. “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 now — despite the Biden administration’s prolonged efforts through a family reunification task force — hundreds of children who were separated under this policy remain unreunited with their families.
The inability to secure accountability for those responsible for the family separation policy stands as one of the significant unresolved issues from the Trump era — a challenge that both the Biden-Harris administration and the nation have yet to confront fully.
This oversight could pave the way for a second Trump administration to impose a more severe immigration crackdown, potentially similar to the previous family separation policy. Trump has openly considered this possibility during the campaign cycle, asserting in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, “It doesn’t sound nice, but when a family hears they’re going to be separated, you know what they do? They stay where they are.”
In an unexpected twist, *Separated* has found itself embroiled in the political and media tumult surrounding this year’s presidential election.
The film enjoyed a successful festival run, is currently in limited release, and has been noted by industry publications as a potential Oscar contender. However, after MSNBC acquired the distribution rights in September, the network announced it would hold off on broadcasting the film until after the election — provoking questions from Morris himself, eventually leading to reports that NBC executives opted to delay the film to avoid alienating Trump, hoping he might agree to a debate on the network.
In parallel, the film’s release has seemingly caused some public officials to retreat from the spotlight.
Neither the Biden White House nor the Justice Department commented when questioned about the film and the perceived lack of follow-through on Biden’s and Garland’s assertions made prior to taking office.
Moreover, Biden effectively abandoned a proposed settlement in 2021 that would have offered monetary compensation to impacted families. The only apparent disciplinary action taken by the Justice Department following the policy was against a former attorney who leaked an internal watchdog report draft in late 2020, fearing it might be suppressed ahead of the election.
With regards to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s intent to hold hearings, a source familiar with the situation, who spoke anonymously, indicated that Democrats faced obstacles from Trump administration officials like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who declined to cooperate with their investigation, and noted the evenly divided committee could not issue subpoenas due to Republican opposition.
The summary is stark: “Nothing has happened,” Soboroff told me.
The stage is set for something even graver in the future.
It has become a common refrain to label the immigration system as broken — a legislative and bureaucratic quagmire — but Trump’s family separation policy represented a departure from the norm.
This distinction is articulated with clarity in *Separated* by Jonathan White, a deputy director in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the placement of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border.
The family separation policy, however, targeted children crossing the southern border with adults. This was enforced under the guise of a “zero tolerance” policy initiated by Sessions in April 2018, mandating that anyone apprehended at the southern border be detained and criminally prosecuted. Arrested adults couldn't bring their children, effectively rendering them unaccompanied minors who were then hastily relocated to separate facilities without proper record-keeping for potential reunification. At one point, *Separated* fittingly describes 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.”
In essence, the Trump administration opted to terrorize innocent children as a means to punish their parents and deter future undocumented immigration.
This reality is highlighted in *Separated* through a series of thoughtfully constructed reenactments portraying a mother and her young son's journey across the border and their devastating separation. The boy is then placed in federal custody, confused about what transpired and uncertain when — or if — he will see his mother again.
Reenactments have become a characteristic of Morris’ documentaries, but in this case, they become essential in conveying the situation's gravity to viewers.
“There is no one in my line of work who has actually documented — visually documented — what the separations looked like,” Soboroff noted. “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.”
Interviews conducted by Morris are equally revealing.
Scott Lloyd, the Trump official who headed the Office of Refugee Resettlement and faced considerable criticism, notably struggles to address basic inquiries about his role and the warnings he received concerning the impact on children from people like White during the policy's implementation.
Reflecting on his conversation with Lloyd, Morris noted, “I thought, ‘This is an utter failure.’ The guy wouldn’t say anything.” Despite his silence, the uncomfortable pauses and evasions spoke volumes.
Jallyn Sualog, another official involved during that time, depicts Lloyd in her interview as perhaps ineffectual, but at worst fully complicit in the policy’s execution. White calls Lloyd “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history.”
Despite this, Lloyd was at least willing to participate in an interview. Other Trump officials, such as Sessions, entirely avoided Morris. The documentarian also attempted to engage with Kirstjen Nielsen, then Secretary of Homeland Security, but she ultimately declined to be interviewed.
Tom Homan, the acting director of ICE during the policy's enforcement, had committed to an interview with Morris and the film crew but backed out at the last minute.
Instead of an interview, the film features a clip of Homan speaking at a conservative political conference, where he vociferously dismisses critics of the policy. “Oddly enough,” Morris remarked, “I could never have done a better job of revealing his character than he did himself.”
Homan has pledged to return to the government if Trump is reelected, promising to “run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.” “They ain’t seen shit yet,” he warned over the summer. He likely won’t be the only former Trump official involved in the family separation policy to return in a second Trump administration.
Stephen Miller, often seen as the principal architect of the policy within the Trump White House, remains close to Trump and continues to express vehement opposition to illegal immigration. Gene Hamilton, who was a counselor to Sessions and effectively collaborated with Miller on the policy’s design, is also likely to reemerge in a second Trump term.
Hamilton authored the chapter in Project 2025 detailing the Justice Department's potential direction in a second Trump administration — a blueprint proposing sweeping changes and an aggressive approach to illegal immigration.
“Trump seems to me to be a fascist,” said Morris when discussing the film and the possibility of Trump’s return, several days before the topic gained traction on the campaign trail. “I don’t want to use the word lightly,” he added, “but as an American Jew whose family emigrated from Eastern Europe to this country, it’s hard not to see elements of fascism.”
With the election looming in a precarious balance, the likelihood of another harsh immigration crackdown — with potentially dire repercussions for the targets and the communities they inhabit — looms large. Trump has incessantly discussed a mass deportation agenda; Republicans have largely backed this idea; and polls show considerable support for it among the public.
It might have been inevitable for the public and Democrats to shift their focus away from the family separation crisis. Yet this situation demanded accountability, irrespective of political considerations.
In a properly functioning political climate, the public would have expected a genuine examination of the policy and its repercussions, along with a clear, compelling chronicle of what actually transpired and the harm inflicted by the Trump administration.
Key figures like Sessions, Nielsen, Homan, and Miller should have been compelled to testify under oath about their troubling roles in this policy, alongside other, less recognized but equally responsible individuals like Hamilton. Instead, these officials seem to enjoy comfort and discretion, occasionally reappearing in public and, in some cases, positioning themselves for more power if Trump returns to office.
The Justice Department under Garland has similarly failed to respond appropriately, neglecting to conduct a serious internal review or accountability regarding the policy’s implementation and the roles played by those involved. While there was no requirement for an extensive purge or mass firings, the policy necessitated participation from line prosecutors and supervisors in U.S. Attorney’s offices along the southern border who executed and brought the cases that enabled these separations. These individuals could have opted out.
With the absence of any public rebuke from the current administration, the Justice Department sends a troubling message to its rank-and-file personnel: It’s sensible to comply — even when asked to partake in an explicitly immoral government initiative. The implication is that there will be no significant long-term professional repercussions for being a critical part of a morally reprehensible bureaucratic operation.
It’s possible that another iteration of the family separation policy would be difficult for Trump to enforce if he wins again. The American Civil Liberties Union, which spearheaded the resistance to the policy under Trump, secured a settlement in litigation last year that ostensibly restricts any future administration from pursuing a similar tactic. However, there remains considerable uncertainty about how a second Trump administration would approach this issue. Hamilton’s chapter in Project 2025 discusses the goal of “proactive litigation” to dismantle such agreements, though executing this is easier said than done.
The more immediate concern could be the enactment of an entirely new series of broad, unilateral executive measures aimed at swiftly detaining and deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible — potentially inflicting severe harm on families and their communities. Such a crackdown might manifest its own brutal nature, possibly prompting a fresh wave of public outcry, but as *Separated* illustrates, one crucial takeaway from the family separation policy is that malicious government actors can inflict profound and irreversible damage even when an effort ultimately collapses.
Soboroff, for one, has grappled with understanding how public and political indignation over the policy dissipated so swiftly after Biden’s inauguration. He has formulated a disconcerting theory.
“This was easy for [the public] to understand,” Soboroff observed, “and there was an easy target in Donald Trump.” However, the moment immigration reform became a “political liability” for the Biden administration, there was little interest in revisiting the issue.
Rather than confronting the stark realities of an immigration system rife with failures and abuses, a significant portion of the public, enabled by the political class, opted to look away — a decision that could yield unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences in the future.
“People want to know less,” he remarked.
Sanya Singh contributed to this report for TROIB News
The widespread moral outrage was directed at one of the most disturbing initiatives of the Trump administration — the separation of migrant children from their parents. However, the political and legal context has shifted significantly since then.
After Donald Trump exited office, there were no criminal or congressional investigations into the family separation policy. The Justice Department under Garland has taken no steps to reprimand or sanction those who created and enforced the policy. Meanwhile, Trump has been campaigning on a more extreme anti-immigration agenda than ever, vowing to deport millions upon reelection.
How did we arrive at this point?
That question is among several raised by the documentary *Separated* — a thorough and damning work from acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris and NBC reporter Jacob Soboroff, who, along with other journalists, have closely followed the family separation policy and its consequences. Officially in place for only a few months before Trump had to retreat due to public backlash, the administration managed to separate over 5,000 children from their families in that short time after apprehending them at the southern border.
“There was something different about these policies,” Morris explained in a recent interview about the film with Soboroff. “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 now — despite the Biden administration’s prolonged efforts through a family reunification task force — hundreds of children who were separated under this policy remain unreunited with their families.
The inability to secure accountability for those responsible for the family separation policy stands as one of the significant unresolved issues from the Trump era — a challenge that both the Biden-Harris administration and the nation have yet to confront fully.
This oversight could pave the way for a second Trump administration to impose a more severe immigration crackdown, potentially similar to the previous family separation policy. Trump has openly considered this possibility during the campaign cycle, asserting in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, “It doesn’t sound nice, but when a family hears they’re going to be separated, you know what they do? They stay where they are.”
In an unexpected twist, *Separated* has found itself embroiled in the political and media tumult surrounding this year’s presidential election.
The film enjoyed a successful festival run, is currently in limited release, and has been noted by industry publications as a potential Oscar contender. However, after MSNBC acquired the distribution rights in September, the network announced it would hold off on broadcasting the film until after the election — provoking questions from Morris himself, eventually leading to reports that NBC executives opted to delay the film to avoid alienating Trump, hoping he might agree to a debate on the network.
In parallel, the film’s release has seemingly caused some public officials to retreat from the spotlight.
Neither the Biden White House nor the Justice Department commented when questioned about the film and the perceived lack of follow-through on Biden’s and Garland’s assertions made prior to taking office.
Moreover, Biden effectively abandoned a proposed settlement in 2021 that would have offered monetary compensation to impacted families. The only apparent disciplinary action taken by the Justice Department following the policy was against a former attorney who leaked an internal watchdog report draft in late 2020, fearing it might be suppressed ahead of the election.
With regards to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s intent to hold hearings, a source familiar with the situation, who spoke anonymously, indicated that Democrats faced obstacles from Trump administration officials like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who declined to cooperate with their investigation, and noted the evenly divided committee could not issue subpoenas due to Republican opposition.
The summary is stark: “Nothing has happened,” Soboroff told me.
The stage is set for something even graver in the future.
It has become a common refrain to label the immigration system as broken — a legislative and bureaucratic quagmire — but Trump’s family separation policy represented a departure from the norm.
This distinction is articulated with clarity in *Separated* by Jonathan White, a deputy director in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the placement of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border.
The family separation policy, however, targeted children crossing the southern border with adults. This was enforced under the guise of a “zero tolerance” policy initiated by Sessions in April 2018, mandating that anyone apprehended at the southern border be detained and criminally prosecuted. Arrested adults couldn't bring their children, effectively rendering them unaccompanied minors who were then hastily relocated to separate facilities without proper record-keeping for potential reunification. At one point, *Separated* fittingly describes 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.”
In essence, the Trump administration opted to terrorize innocent children as a means to punish their parents and deter future undocumented immigration.
This reality is highlighted in *Separated* through a series of thoughtfully constructed reenactments portraying a mother and her young son's journey across the border and their devastating separation. The boy is then placed in federal custody, confused about what transpired and uncertain when — or if — he will see his mother again.
Reenactments have become a characteristic of Morris’ documentaries, but in this case, they become essential in conveying the situation's gravity to viewers.
“There is no one in my line of work who has actually documented — visually documented — what the separations looked like,” Soboroff noted. “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.”
Interviews conducted by Morris are equally revealing.
Scott Lloyd, the Trump official who headed the Office of Refugee Resettlement and faced considerable criticism, notably struggles to address basic inquiries about his role and the warnings he received concerning the impact on children from people like White during the policy's implementation.
Reflecting on his conversation with Lloyd, Morris noted, “I thought, ‘This is an utter failure.’ The guy wouldn’t say anything.” Despite his silence, the uncomfortable pauses and evasions spoke volumes.
Jallyn Sualog, another official involved during that time, depicts Lloyd in her interview as perhaps ineffectual, but at worst fully complicit in the policy’s execution. White calls Lloyd “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history.”
Despite this, Lloyd was at least willing to participate in an interview. Other Trump officials, such as Sessions, entirely avoided Morris. The documentarian also attempted to engage with Kirstjen Nielsen, then Secretary of Homeland Security, but she ultimately declined to be interviewed.
Tom Homan, the acting director of ICE during the policy's enforcement, had committed to an interview with Morris and the film crew but backed out at the last minute.
Instead of an interview, the film features a clip of Homan speaking at a conservative political conference, where he vociferously dismisses critics of the policy. “Oddly enough,” Morris remarked, “I could never have done a better job of revealing his character than he did himself.”
Homan has pledged to return to the government if Trump is reelected, promising to “run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.” “They ain’t seen shit yet,” he warned over the summer. He likely won’t be the only former Trump official involved in the family separation policy to return in a second Trump administration.
Stephen Miller, often seen as the principal architect of the policy within the Trump White House, remains close to Trump and continues to express vehement opposition to illegal immigration. Gene Hamilton, who was a counselor to Sessions and effectively collaborated with Miller on the policy’s design, is also likely to reemerge in a second Trump term.
Hamilton authored the chapter in Project 2025 detailing the Justice Department's potential direction in a second Trump administration — a blueprint proposing sweeping changes and an aggressive approach to illegal immigration.
“Trump seems to me to be a fascist,” said Morris when discussing the film and the possibility of Trump’s return, several days before the topic gained traction on the campaign trail. “I don’t want to use the word lightly,” he added, “but as an American Jew whose family emigrated from Eastern Europe to this country, it’s hard not to see elements of fascism.”
With the election looming in a precarious balance, the likelihood of another harsh immigration crackdown — with potentially dire repercussions for the targets and the communities they inhabit — looms large. Trump has incessantly discussed a mass deportation agenda; Republicans have largely backed this idea; and polls show considerable support for it among the public.
It might have been inevitable for the public and Democrats to shift their focus away from the family separation crisis. Yet this situation demanded accountability, irrespective of political considerations.
In a properly functioning political climate, the public would have expected a genuine examination of the policy and its repercussions, along with a clear, compelling chronicle of what actually transpired and the harm inflicted by the Trump administration.
Key figures like Sessions, Nielsen, Homan, and Miller should have been compelled to testify under oath about their troubling roles in this policy, alongside other, less recognized but equally responsible individuals like Hamilton. Instead, these officials seem to enjoy comfort and discretion, occasionally reappearing in public and, in some cases, positioning themselves for more power if Trump returns to office.
The Justice Department under Garland has similarly failed to respond appropriately, neglecting to conduct a serious internal review or accountability regarding the policy’s implementation and the roles played by those involved. While there was no requirement for an extensive purge or mass firings, the policy necessitated participation from line prosecutors and supervisors in U.S. Attorney’s offices along the southern border who executed and brought the cases that enabled these separations. These individuals could have opted out.
With the absence of any public rebuke from the current administration, the Justice Department sends a troubling message to its rank-and-file personnel: It’s sensible to comply — even when asked to partake in an explicitly immoral government initiative. The implication is that there will be no significant long-term professional repercussions for being a critical part of a morally reprehensible bureaucratic operation.
It’s possible that another iteration of the family separation policy would be difficult for Trump to enforce if he wins again. The American Civil Liberties Union, which spearheaded the resistance to the policy under Trump, secured a settlement in litigation last year that ostensibly restricts any future administration from pursuing a similar tactic. However, there remains considerable uncertainty about how a second Trump administration would approach this issue. Hamilton’s chapter in Project 2025 discusses the goal of “proactive litigation” to dismantle such agreements, though executing this is easier said than done.
The more immediate concern could be the enactment of an entirely new series of broad, unilateral executive measures aimed at swiftly detaining and deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible — potentially inflicting severe harm on families and their communities. Such a crackdown might manifest its own brutal nature, possibly prompting a fresh wave of public outcry, but as *Separated* illustrates, one crucial takeaway from the family separation policy is that malicious government actors can inflict profound and irreversible damage even when an effort ultimately collapses.
Soboroff, for one, has grappled with understanding how public and political indignation over the policy dissipated so swiftly after Biden’s inauguration. He has formulated a disconcerting theory.
“This was easy for [the public] to understand,” Soboroff observed, “and there was an easy target in Donald Trump.” However, the moment immigration reform became a “political liability” for the Biden administration, there was little interest in revisiting the issue.
Rather than confronting the stark realities of an immigration system rife with failures and abuses, a significant portion of the public, enabled by the political class, opted to look away — a decision that could yield unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences in the future.
“People want to know less,” he remarked.
Sanya Singh contributed to this report for TROIB News
