Separated: Inside an American Tragedy
Jacob Soboroff
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007
Copyright © 2020 by Jacob Soboroff
As Donald Trump screeches his way to the inglorious end of his presidency, we need to take stock of all we have lost along the way. Including the kids. Jacob Soboroff, a self-described “unlikely eyewitness to one of the most shameful chapters in modern American history,” trusted what he saw, relied on his heart — and his reality as a young parent — to give us the critically important “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.”
Many followed his work on MSNBC as he shined a light on the administration’s family separation policy — a policy child welfare experts termed “an unparalleled abuse of the human rights of children.” Which, as the American Academy of Pediatrics declared, leaves “thousands of kids traumatized for life.”
It’s a story we almost missed. Why? Because family separation was shrouded in lies. Lies that continued even after we could see the cages with our own eyes, hear the children crying.
“Separated” is the story of the unwitting victims of the Trump administration’s desire to make it almost impossible for those fleeing violence in Latin America to find asylum here. How? Changing what constituted acceptable grounds for asylum, with impossibly long lines at legal crossing points; increasing the penalty for crossing the border illegally from a civil to a criminal penalty; jailing adults; and separating and dispatching their children to overcrowded detention facilities, moving them far from their parents, making it incredibly difficult for them to communicate, then pressuring parents to forego their parental rights.
It’s also the story of those who, from Trump to Kelly to Nielsen to Sessions, designed, implemented, and lied about a policy that caused such unnecessary pain to innocent children and their heartbroken parents. Who lost kids.
Yes, there were those few who cared about children, like Commander White and Jim De La Cruz at the Office for Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and Lee Gelernt at the ACLU who filed Ms. L v. ICE on behalf of a group of immigrants who were separated from their children, but so many who didn’t; those who cared about governmental accountability and those who did everything in their power to keep these policies secret. Soboroff concludes: “What I have now unequivocally learned is that the Trump administration’s family separation policy was an avoidable catastrophe made worse by people who could have made it better at multiple inflection points…”
“Separated” chronicles not only the efforts of those determined to enshrine their deterrence policies, but also, by presenting under-oath declarations in the court case Ms. L v. ICE and interviews, portrays some of those who’ve crossed the border seeking asylum.
DECLARATION OF MS. C.
MS. L V. ICEI am a citizen of Brazil and am seeking asylum in the United States. When I came to the United States, I passed my initial asylum interview (“credible fear interview”) and am now in immigration proceedings before an immigration judge to seek asylum.
Although I was seeking asylum, I was convicted of the misdemeanor of entering the country illegally. When a border guard approached me a few feet after I entered the country [on August 26, 2017], I explained I was seeking asylum. I was still prosecuted. I spent 25 days in jail for the misdemeanor.
After my jail sentence, I was sent, on September 22, 2017, to an immigration detention center in Texas called the El Paso Processing Center and transferred to the West Texas Detention Facility, also known as Sierra Blanca… I am attempting to proceed with my asylum claim from detention.
My biological son, J., is 14 and came with me from Brazil. He is also seeking asylum.
When I was sent to jail for my conviction, my son was taken from me and sent to a facility in Chicago.
I know that the jail did not allow children to stay with their parents. But I have now [been] out of jail and have been in immigration detention since September 22, 2017. I am desperate to be reunited with my son. I would like to be released with my son so we can live with friends in the United States while we pursue our asylum cases. But if we cannot be released, I would like us to be detained together.
I worry about J. constantly and don’t know when I will see him. We have talked on the phone only a [sic] five or six times since he was taken away from me. I know that J. is having a very hard time detained all by himself without me. He is only a 14-year-old boy in a strange country and needs his parent.
I hope I can be with my son very soon. I miss him and am scared for him.
I declare under the penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America that the foregoing is true and correct, based on my personal knowledge. Executed in Sierra Blanca, Texas, on March, 7, 2018.
Fortunately, on June 13, 2018 at the invitation of Katie Waldman, the 26-year-old press aide to Kirstjen Nielsen, Soboroff and his team toured Casa Padre, a converted Walmart. Soboroff describes the scene: “The lobby of Casa Padre shelter, in Brownsville, Texas, could have passed for a spa or doctor’s office — front desk with a sign-in sheet, tile floors, chairs in a waiting area. I was nervous and knew that whatever I and the assembled group of ten or so reporters would see beyond this lobby would be the first glimpse any journalist had been given of detained children separated by President Trump …” [Emphasis added]
Dr. Juan Sanchez, [shelter operator] Southwest Key’s leader, noted they were above capacity, that “1,497 kids were inside a building meant for thirty-nine less than that — that day accounting for 13 percent of all children in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement nationwide. As he explained it, the increase in referrals was a direct result of children being taken from their parents, children who would otherwise not require the services of his organization.”
Then “the door opened into the cavernous facility. All I could see were young boys everywhere I looked. I jotted down what I saw and what I was thinking … If the boys weren’t sitting in chairs along walls waiting together in a room, or sitting at cafeteria-style tables, they were in line to eat. In their hands were trays holding Oreo cookies, applesauce, Jell-O, chicken, and mashed potatoes.
“I was walking side by side with Alexia Rodriguez, the lawyer for the facility. When I expressed amazement at what I was seeing, without skipping a beat she told me and another reporter standing near her to smile at the kids because ‘they feel like animals in a cage being looked at.’ I think she realized how truthful she had just been, because she immediately said she didn’t want that comment to be on the record, which, of course, is not how that works.
“The kids were looking at us with a deer-in-the-headlights gaze … As we continued walking, she explained all of the approximately 1,500 kids would eat in a two-hour window, rotating. Disobeying orders, I couldn’t help saying hello, asking the children how they were doing the best I could with my limited Spanish. I soon was asked to stop …
“Along one wall, I saw a phone, which signage made clear was for the young boys detained here to use if they wanted to raise a complaint outside of the building. Next to the phone was a piece of paper with names of local service organizations children could call for help …”
Thanks to a Freedom of Information request by the Center for Public Integrity, we learned the price the separated children were paying:
“After children here completed the intake process, I was told, they’d be given the opportunity to make two calls a week to sponsors or family members in their home countries. These boys were ages ten to seventeen. What about smaller kids, for whom remembering a phone number, street address, or even last name wasn’t possible?…
“We made it to our final stop, the clinical office, a small medical facility inside Casa Padre … Kids had the ability to see a mental health clinician or psychiatrist, who could prescribe children psychotropic medicines without the consent of their separated parents because while in their ‘care and custody,’ as they like to put it, the Office of Refugee Resettlement [ORR] and its director Scott Lloyd are technically their custodians…”
Dr. Sanchez told Soboroff “separations had undoubtedly led to the overcrowded situation we were both walking through. But he went on to note that another Trump administration policy — fingerprinting potential sponsors of children and other members of their household — was scaring away people from picking up unaccompanied children, and was contributing to the situation. That meant a lack of bed space. Sanchez said there were more than five thousand kids in his custody alone at the twenty-six Southwest Key shelters across the country, representing nearly half of the total overall population in the care of the government.” [Emphasis added]
While forbidden from bringing a camera, Soboroff would bear witness that our country, “under the direction of President Donald Trump, was ripping parents and children apart … I was shell-shocked … This place is called a shelter, but effectively these kids are incarcerated,” he told a national television audience.
A few days later, Soboroff was at the Ursula Border Patrol Central Processing Station, near McAllen, Texas, “where more children were separated from their parents than anywhere else on the border. There they shut families into what a Border Patrol agent told me were ‘pods,’ a generous description.”
“‘ICE is the conduit for ORR to get them to the facilities,’ Agent Lopez told us in front of another cage filled with humans. ‘These are family units, male head of household,’ he continued, responding to another question as he pointed to the fathers and children who were kept together. Not far away were cages with young girls, alone, and another with children and their mothers. Four ‘pods’ total, holding 525 members of families together, and another one with 179 children who either had arrived alone or were separated from their parents …
“I asked Agent Lopez if there were social workers here, and he admitted there were only four for the hundreds of children. We requested to speak with them. The answer was, again, no. Another reporter, in Spanish, snuck a question to a caged woman, who told us she wasn’t aware of separations happening, likely meaning she had not yet had her case processed by agents, or had arrived with a child younger than five.
“Migrants were being told of the policy only if they were involved in a separation. Then they were given an informational ‘tear sheet,’ which explained in English and Spanish that they were about to be charged with a crime and their child would be moved to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, where they could find them by dialing a phone number. The tear sheet only recently had been added to the process on the orders of CBP commissioner McAleenan, meaning hundreds if not thousands previously went through the process without that information.” [Emphasis added]
“Another mother told us that even if a parent was charged and sentenced to ‘time served,’ meaning they were free to come back to pick up their children, there was the possibility that children would have already been moved out to an ORR shelter and were now in the custody of the federal government for the foreseeable future …”
Soboroff tells us: “The Trump administration was potentially ‘creating thousands of immigrant orphans,’ as a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement put it, by deporting separated parents before they were given a chance to reunite.’” During his report for MSNBC, Soboroff declared: “People in here are locked up in cages, essentially what look like animal kennels. I don’t know any other way to describe it.” [Emphasis added]
He reached out to Lindsay Toczylowski, an immigrant rights lawyer contracted to offer legal services to children detained in shelters run by ORR in Southern California. Toczylowski told Soboroff that her 3-year-old separated client had “‘started climbing up on the table’ in court … [and] clued me in to the Trump administration’s lack of a plan to reunite families … I thought of my son, not quite three but a table climber nevertheless. The idea of him being anywhere alone and made to fend for himself made me sick …”
Toczylowski was seeing parents “deported almost immediately” after separations. “She told me about Victorville and the hundreds of migrants, including separated fathers, who were in both the federal prison and the immigration detention center not far away in Adelanto. I had never heard of Adelanto, one of the largest immigration detention facilities in the United States. There, without attorneys, she told me that parents were making decisions not to fight for asylum claims, influenced by the government telling them the quickest way to reunite with their children was to be deported with them. ‘If they did have counsel, they could go through with their asylum claim,’ she told me.”
Later, Toczylowski introduced him to Juan (a pseudonym), who claimed he had been coerced into signing away his ability to be reunited with his son, José. Juan and José are central to “Separated.” Their story makes everything so heartbreakingly real. It begins in Petén, Guatemala, located close to Mexico and Belize, where Juan had a small convenience store. Juan had several times left his wife Maria, son José, and two younger daughters behind, paying a coyote to smuggle him through Mexico to make money for his family in the U.S., working here for stretches as long as 2010–2014.
They lived near Aeropuerto Internacional Mundo Maya, an airport used by tourists visiting the Mayan ruins. Recently, unfortunately, it serviced the drug trade. As a result, Petén had some of Guatemala’s highest homicide rates.
Soboroff continues: “Juan’s nephew had sold a car that was still legally registered in Juan’s name. The new owner, who Juan believed to be a member of a drug cartel, wanted him to sign paperwork turning over ownership of the car, something Juan did not think he had the right to do. If he didn’t, the man threatened, he would be killed, and he feared, so would his son José.
“Juan, a devout evangelical Christian, was terrified. He thought of his family … He knew what could happen if he tried to push back … In a place where narco-violence was commonplace and murders were not unusual, he felt as though he faced certain death.
“Juan, who had twice before made the journey to the United States, believed doing it again, this time with his son, was his only way to survive. His wife and daughters, also in danger, would seek shelter outside of his home … he felt he needed to leave the country as soon as possible … [They] hadn’t heard anything about the separation of migrant families at the border of the United States and Mexico … The father and son had only slightly less information about the policy than I did, despite the fact I had asked the secretary of homeland security about it to her face six days earlier …” [Emphasis added]
Few of us have needed to make such a trip, and we owe it to those who’ve been imprisoned and separated from their children to spend some time imagining what would prompt such a journey: “Juan, carrying nothing but a backpack, had spent everything he had earned at his store back home … He knew the two-week-plus journey would be a risky one, and that the price they would pay in money would likely change along the way, which it did. He knew that on every bus, and in every hotel, they had to be extra aware of their surroundings. He understood they would be targets for Los Zetas, the notorious and dangerous cartel operating where they came from in Guatemala and throughout Mexico, moving drugs and guns and trafficking humans — while killing civilians who crossed them.”
There are so many reasons to get yourself a copy of “Separated.” Soboroff offers the chilling history of our changing immigration policy, one highly political decision after another, made to create the effective deterrence the President demanded. But, like his response to COVID, the President’s lack of planning and coherence caused chaos, separating and incarcerating families without a clear way of identifying them later, aided by lies like Nielsen’s, knowing she endorsed a separation policy:
Juan and José were taken into custody a minute after they crossed the border. After: “an agent conducted what is known as a field interview with them, concluding Juan was ‘a citizen and national of Guatemala illegally in the United States,’ as he wrote in his report. In Border Patrol lingo, they had been ‘apprehended,’ or arrested. It was their last moment of freedom for what would be months … Juan and José weren’t sure what to expect, but this is in some way how they had hoped it would play out, in order to declare asylum and, once and for all, find safety from the dangers they had fled in Petén.
“Juan and José were transported together to the Yuma Border Patrol Station for what should have been a routine booking: they’d have biographical information obtained, get fingerprinted, and snap a photo taken in order to be ‘submitted into all available databases’ … In Juan’s words, this is where they were ‘kidnapped.’ By agents of the United States. It was worse than anything he experienced in Petén or on their journey to Arizona. Juan’s cell was filled with other parents, José’s with other children … all he could do was pray, seeing agents and staff come and go at night, but no sign of his boy …
“Juan had been charged Monday night with three crimes: 8 U.S.C. § 1325, ‘entry of alien at improper time or place misrep/concealment of facts’; 8 U.S.C. § 1182, ‘alien inadmissibility under section 212’; and 212a7Ail, ‘immigrant without an immigrant visa.’ That meant, under zero tolerance, he would soon be remanded to the custody of the U.S. marshals in order to face … a criminal charge instead of a civil one — that was different from the norm. It was a charge that would legally necessitate the separation of him and José. He had no idea.
“That first night, a Border Patrol agent told him, ‘Only your child can stay in the United States.’ Juan wanted to declare asylum for them both and explain why they had made the journey, but a Border Patrol agent told him to sign documents admitting he entered the country illegally, with no mention of asylum. So he did. [Emphasis added]
“He felt like he was losing his mind. ‘We knew nothing about what was happening,’ he later recalled. In the middle of his third night in custody, a guard came to take Juan out of his cell. He asked to see José. ‘Even for thirty seconds,’ Juan begged of the Border Patrol agent, who ignored his plea.
“Inconsolable, Juan was crying as he was led out of Yuma station and into a transport vehicle. Tears wet his eyes on the three-hour drive, his anguish heightened by uncertainty, about where he was going or what would happen to his son …” That morning he was booked into the ICE facility in Florence, Arizona. Three days later, he was transported to federal prison in Victorville: “The shackles that restrained him were meant for violent criminals, not asylum seekers … The prison complex is huge, home to more than 3,500 inmates, and under a plan hatched between ICE and the Bureau of Prisons, it would be filled with an additional one thousand migrants, including Juan … He was now more than four hundred miles away from his son. There was no good-bye.”
“Immediately after arriving, he started asking questions, as he and other immigrants, segregated from the rest of the inmate population, found themselves each with a single prison uniform, often on cell confinement or lockdown, and without access to legal counsel. Where is my son? Can I make a phone call? Can I eat anything other than this bread and ham? The answer from the guards, he said, was always the same. No …
“Still in the same dirty clothes he jumped over the border fence in, José wondered about what would happen to his father … His mother and sisters, thousands of miles away, wondered why they had not called. Finally, after what seemed like days without answers … [he was] taken to an airport, where José boarded an airplane for the first time in his life. Joining him were other children who had also been detained at the Yuma Border Patrol Station. They, too, had been separated from their parents. Like José, none knew where they were … José was able to find out the answer to one question — what their destination was. “Harlingen,” the social worker told him.”
After almost a month in Adelanto, Juan was presented with the Separated Parent’s Removal Form “in a language he didn’t understand despite the fact that when he was apprehended, it was noted he did not speak English. Now he was presented with two options — neither of which, as lawyer Lindsay Toczylowski had warned me, said anything about a right to pursue an asylum claim.”
I don’t pretend to know the answer to the extraordinarily complicated issue of immigration, but I do know it’s still with us. And I do know that we all can benefit from reading Jacob Soboroff’s “Separated.” Learn by following Juan and José’s journey from arrest to separation, incarceration, and eventual reunification. Appreciate the gallant work done by attorneys Lee Gelernt and Lindsay Toczylowski. Recognize the critical reporting of journalists like Soboroff and Julia Ainsley of NBC News, Caitlin Dickerson of the New York Times, and Lomi Kriel of the Houston Chronicle. Experience the remarkable humanity of those who risked so much, traveled so far, and endured such pain to try to find freedom in our country.
All the while, Juan was imprisoned with no knowledge of where José was, with no ability to contact him and, as Soboroff notes, there was “no information about José in Juan’s case file, meaning they couldn’t be connected even if he wanted to be.” Meanwhile, at Harlingen, José made it clear that all he wanted was to see his father again.
“José had been trying to reach his mom for days to explain what had happened, but his calls went unanswered … not knowing she would sleep elsewhere, scared of the men who threatened her husband and son … When a social worker was able to finally track down Juan — once he had been transferred from the Victorville prison to the Adelanto immigration detention center — they were finally able to connect. Instead of catching up after so many days apart, the phone call was a conduit for raw emotion. Father and son spent most of the time on the line only crying. Both finally realized that neither of them was going anywhere anytime soon, and that they were not alone in their forced separation. ‘That’s the end of my life,’ fourteen-year-old José thought to himself.” [Emphasis added]
As for Juan: “Intimidated and alone, his only hope would be legal representation that could undo what he had inadvertently done: telling the United States government he wanted to be deported without his son …” Luckily, Lindsay Toczylowski was now representing imprisoned immigrants at Adelanto, and she and her associate, Alfonso Maldonado Silva, were soon able to get Juan the “credible fear” interview he should have been given in Arizona.
Soboroff asked Toczylowski whether Juan had actually wanted to give up his right to be reunited with his son: “Absolutely not. He actually refers to this — him signing this document that he didn’t understand — as a sin … Because he didn’t know what he was signing, and only now that he is working with attorneys does he understand the repercussions of what he signed. And people will sign, because it’s an officer in a uniform, you know, telling them that they should sign this … Officials told the detainees ‘that they were going to be deported regardless, and it’s up to them to decide whether they want their child deported with them or if they want their child released to some family member here.’
“And they said: ‘those are your only options.’
‘And are those their only options?’
‘No,’ both Alfonso and Lindsay said at the exact same time …”
“Eighteen days after they first requested it, and eight days after the deadline, he was finally being interviewed by an asylum officer … For one hour and fifty-two minutes Juan and the young woman spoke on the phone as he explained the circumstances that drove him to travel from Guatemala to the Arizona desert and jump over the small international border fence there. The asylum officer had virtually every detail about him … that he identified as an indigenous Guatemalan who spoke Spanish and Achi, a local dialect; he was an evangelical Christian; his fourteen-year-old son, José, was apprehended on the fourth day of June; and on the seventh he, Juan, was locked up in Florence before he was transferred to California …
“Juan answered ‘yes’ to two critically important questions: ‘Have you or any member of your family ever been mistreated or threatened by anyone in any country to which you may be returned?’ and ‘Do you have any reason to fear harm from anyone in any country to which you may be returned?’…
The asylum officer read Juan this statement: “If the Department of Homeland Security determines you have a credible fear of persecution or torture, your case will be referred to an Immigration court, where you will be allowed to seek asylum or withholding of removal based on fear of persecution or withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture …
“And the same day, she made a determination. ‘The applicant is found credible’ … Juan, under the law, would now have a chance to be reunited with José. But his time in Adelanto was not yet finished. The same day, the Trump administration, in a court-ordered filing, claimed that, according to their latest tally, 167 children’s parents had ‘indicated desire against reunification.’ These families were part of the larger number of 497 children, including twenty-two under five years old, whom the government deemed ineligible to reunite. José, who was still in Harlingen, Texas, was in both categories, and was locked into a daily routine set by his caregivers at the shelter.”
The following morning, Soboroff and his crew were allowed into Adelanto “into a tiny room where lawyers were permitted to consult with their clients. We set up our cameras, waiting for Juan to arrive. To my knowledge, it was the first time cameras had been allowed inside ICE detention to film a separated parent. [Emphasis added]
Juan told Soboroff: “The most difficult part of it all was when they separated us three days later in these cold rooms. I asked the official to give us a chance to say good-bye. Just thirty seconds to hug my son, because there was a bus waiting for us out front … And they gave me my backpack,’ the one he had jumped the wall with. ‘It’s almost like I’m an animal.’
“‘Like an animal?’ I asked. ‘Yeah,’ he responded in English.
“When the conversation turned to the forms he had signed waiving the right to reunification with José, his face turned more grim … ‘They told me I would not be reunited with my son. If I wanted to be reunited, they would have deported me,’ he said. ‘You thought the only options were be reunited and deported or you be deported and he stays here. So you thought that’s the better option.’ … ‘But it turns out,’ I said turning to Toczylowski, ‘you’re his lawyer. Those are not the only two options.’”
“‘In fact once he was able to speak with a lawyer we evaluated his case and realized he has a viable claim for asylum, as does his son … He had already been ordered removed by the government,’ she said, using the legal term for deported. She explained that the day before we were there, his credible fear interview was successful. ‘Which means now he’ll get the chance to see the judge.’”
“The smile began to return to Juan’s face. ‘Juan, how does it feel now that you know that even though you signed these,’ I said pointing to the documents on which he waived his reunification right, ‘working with Lindsay you might have a chance to get back together with José?’ …
“His smile grew bigger. ‘I’m happy that there are these people. They’re like angels. Working hard, trying to rescue all these people.’ I asked him what he expected if and when he and José got back together. I naïvely thought his answer would be unbridled joy. ‘That’s something I wonder about myself. How long is it going to take for us to heal from all of the wounds and trauma we’ve suffered? I have been thinking about this. And I know we need to remain calm.’ …
“I drove home again that night, able to see my family, meeting my wife and son, four siblings, and parents for dinner to celebrate my dad’s seventieth birthday … As we did, I thought about José, who that fall would celebrate his fifteenth birthday. Both he and his father were unsure if it would happen with both of them still in the custody of the United States of America.”
Some final thoughts: Soboroff acknowledges that growing pressure by Mexican and Central Americans seeking to come to the United States has, over the years, engendered “harsh” immigration policies, but why, he wonders, ‘Was its implementation, according to healthcare professionals, so needlessly cruel? Why was its ending so astonishingly sloppy? And why were its ramifications so ill-considered?” [Emphasis added]
Soboroff writes: “Since the summer of 2017, the Trump administration has taken at least 5,556 kids from their parents. But still today, nobody knows for sure exactly how many families have been separated. In February 2020, the United States Government Accountability Office noted, ‘it is unclear the extent to which Border Patrol has accurate records of separated [families] in its data system.’ Scarce few of their stories have been told. Most will never be. There are families who were quickly put back together, and children who were, as predicted, permanently orphaned. My one little blue notebook could never do all their stories justice, nor is this book an attempt to. I encourage you to seek out, read, and learn about what happened from as many sources as you can.”
I second that advice. Because, on the deepest level, we are responsible for what has been done to people who only wanted to apply for asylum, for their chance at the American dream. Our tax money. Our public servants. Our jails and juvenile detention centers. Oh, and by the way, while many Americans might imagine Juan unworthy, when he finally got his chance in court, several people who had known him from his time as an undocumented immigrant in Virginia swore to the judge that they would house him, employ him, and ensure he appear whenever called to court. In their eyes, he was already worthy of citizenship.
