Errol Morris’s “Separated” is an Important Film About a Shocking Human Rights Violation

But MSNBC Eviscerated Its Sobering Message Condemning the Separation of Immigrant Parents and Children by Interrupting its TV Broadcast with 30 Minutes of Glitzy Commercials

NBC News Correspondent Jacob Soboroff wrote an important book in 2020, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris has now collaborated with Soboroff (who served as Executive Producer) to use the book as the basis for a new MSNBC documentary, Separated.

The film documents the first Trump administration’s shocking and deliberate policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border as a means of deterring immigration — even, or perhaps especially, immigration by Central Americans with legitimate asylum claims who literally turned themselves in to Border Patrol officials and asked for protection, as U.S. law allows asylum seekers to do.

The documentary made the rounds of film festivals and selected theaters in 2024 before having its television premiere on MSNBC on December 7, 2024. As a long-time immigration lawyer, an admirer of Soboroff’s reporting, and the Executive Producer of the 2022 documentary Las Abogadas: Attorneys on the Front Lines of the Migrant Crisis, I was eager to watch it.

Disgraceful Commercial Breaks

By about five minutes into the broadcast, however, the film was interrupted by a commercial break. This continued to happen every 5-10 minutes for the next two hours.

Now I’m no stranger to capitalism, or the business model of commercial television in the United States. Someone has to pay the bills. But the commercials for luxury goods and gambling apps were so jarring when juxtaposed with the film’s depiction of the poverty, desperation and trauma depicted in the film that MSNBC should be ashamed of itself.

Rachel Maddow was featured on the station before the documentary aired, introducing the film and reminding viewers of what happened at the border just a few short years ago. It reminded me that on the Rachel Maddow Show, she typically gets an uninterrupted 20 minutes at the top of her show before the first commercial break. Couldn’t this film have been given at least that much time before the ads began?

I found myself getting angrier and angrier every time the narrative was abruptly interrupted. Seriously, the interruptions by tone-deaf commercials were disturbing, distasteful and utterly disgraceful. I hope Morris and Soboroff are as angry about this as I am.

But You Must Watch This Film

My fury at MSNBC’s broadcast of the film aside, I do want to recommend that anyone fearing what might happen to immigrants (or any disfavored groups) in a second Trump administration find a way to see Separated.

The history, in short, is that the Trump administration deliberately separated migrant children from their parents at the border, and lied about it for months. They didn’t even bother to keep track of which kids belonged to which parents, or maintain accurate counts of how many children were taken away. Years of litigation ensued, and to this day the ACLU’s Lee Gelernt estimates that there may be at least 1,000 children who have still not been reunited with their families.

An October 5, 2024, post by Errol Morris on X.

The film tells a shocking story that has been publicly known for years now, yet one that too few voters in 2024 seem to have understood when they cast their vote for president. Indeed, Morris himself intended the film to be released before the election, and though it did make it into a few theaters before then, the December 7 airing on MSNBC was obviously too late to educate uninformed voters about what had happened.

A previously unsung hero who emerges in the film is Jonathan White, who served as the most senior career official in the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the component of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that is charged with protecting migrant children who appear at the border unaccompanied by an adult. White saw what was happening before his superiors would even acknowledge it, publicly or privately. He did everything within his means to sound the alarm about the suffering to which innocent children — including babies — were being subjected, but to no avail.

Screenshot from the trailer of Separated.

The irony here is that ORR officials were suddenly put in the position of managing an influx of children who were separated from their parents by our own government. White and another ORR official, Jallyn Sualog, are depicted as courageous public servants who became aware of an unfolding tragedy in real time, did what they could to question it if not stop it, failed in those efforts, and are now speaking up to try to ensure that nothing like this happens again.

Family Separation — or Worse — Will Happen Again

But let’s not be naïve and assume family separation will never happen again, or that grand public announcements about policies that purport to avoid family separation won’t end up creating yet another massive human rights violation right before our eyes.

In an interview that aired on Meet the Press on December 8, 2024, President-Elect Trump suggested that in an effort to avoid separating families during his planned mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born children of immigrants could be deported with their immigrant parents. And if Trump succeeds in emptying federal agencies of career civil servants, there may not be anyone left to try to stop this and other horrors. (To be clear: we are talking about the deportation of U.S. citizens.) Instead, we will see government workers just following orders.

A popular meme on social media. Food for thought.

As White says in the film, if politicians “wish to use cruelty to achieve their deterrence ends, such people will be found and such means will be ready at hand.”