La Latino USA listener, it's me Maria no Hosa. So you probably know I host another award winning program. It's called In the Fic. It's our politics podcast from Futuro Media where I, along with several guest hosts who are fabulous, we talk about politics unfiltered, from race to culture to immigration. We cover it all and we drop some singers, if you know what I mean. So today on Latino USA, we are going to share one of our latest ITT episodes.
It's about immigration and what we can expect from Donald Trump's second presidential term. On this episode, my ITT co host Baula Ramos joins me. She's a journalist and writer, and we're also joined by Jacob Soberoff, NBC News National correspondent. We're going to talk about his new documentary film Separated,
which dives into the impact of Trump's family separation policy. So, without further ado, dear listener, here's our conversation, and don't forget to subscribe and like in the Thick wherever you get your podcasts, Enjoy the show. Yo, what a ITT listener. Welcome back to In the Thick. I'm Maria ango Hosa this week, joined by my co host journalist and author Baola Ramos today, who is in the liberated territory of Brooklyn, what's up?
What's up?
Oh yea May? And joining us from Manhattan. Yes, thirty Rock itself is NBC National correspondent Jacob sober Off. He has a big week ahead of him because on December seventh, you're going to be able to catch the film Separated on MSNBC on prime time. The film is based on his reporting about Trump's family separation policy. So Jacob, welcome back to it T. It's good to see you, and.
It is so good to see you guys. Thank you so much for having me.
This is politics unfiltered. Let's get into it. So Jacob, here at it T. We acknowledge the fact that we as journalists are full human beings. We like to ask you, like what's your emotional temperature? Check like how are you doing?
Anxious?
But that's today and always, Maria, I'm a man with many therapists.
We love that.
It's true. Look, I feel grateful.
I feel grateful to be here in this moment, to have this job and career and to get to work with people like the two of you. But I know that this is a really tough time for a lot
of people, and just remain very aware of that. And there's a lot of uncertainty, and speaking of what I talk about in therapy, uncertainty is a hard thing, and I think we all have some level of that now in our personal lives and our professional lives, watching what's happening in the world, and so you know, no bullshit, it's nice to be here with the two of you, to have a sort of a regular conversation at a time when I think we all need it.
I need it, Paula, your temperature check, Komotuta boys Adain.
I had the privilege of escaping to Miami this last week, and I think Miami is an interesting place right now, the newly flipped Trump Miami Land. But somehow, though it may be the sun or the beach, like, there's this ability to completely detach yourself from politics and the news, and I literally spent the last four days doing that. This morning, I felt great, and now that I'm back in New York City talking to both of you from Brooklyn,
that anxiety and uncertainty definitely starts to creep in. And one thing that I did notice though in Miami that was hilarious. There are people that are actively preparing welcome parties for the January six ers that they believe will be soon pardoned, and so that was that definitely made me anxious again. Other than that, I'm.
Going to say, you look very relaxed, But now that I heard that, I stress is building.
Yeah, it's definitely starting to feel like a different reality there.
How are you doing, Madia?
Yeah, what's going on? Riyah?
So I also disconnected, but I was far from Miami. I was in our little teeny tiny cottage with all six of us. I made a great turkey, fabulous But I'm also really happy to be here and happy to
be with both you, Jacob and Bauda. It's great. So we're approaching this second Trump presidency and we're going to spend today's show looking at Trump's immigration policy, what it has meant for the lives of millions of American families in the past, what the future could hold, and what communities are doing to prepare, and how we're all kind of sitting or standing with this new reality. So, as we mentioned, Jacob, back in twenty twenty, you released a
book titled Separated Inside an American tragedy. It detailed the Trump administration's immigration to terns policy, which led to the separation of four thousand, two hundred and twenty seven children, probably more from their parents, and it has been denounced worldwide as a violation of basic human rights. Right this week, a documentary based on that reporting by acclaimed filmmaker Errol Morris is going to premiere on MSNBC.
We were very concerned that some children's separations would be permanent because the parents would be removed from the United States through deportation. So the families had made the journey together, but now the children would remain in the United States. These are state created portions. These are families separated by action of the federal government as a tool of immigration policy.
So when you wrap the documentary, you put up a shocking number right on thy fifty two children still separated from their parents as a result of Trump's policy. I believe you have a new number. But Jacob, can you just take us to the origins of this policy to the present moment, What the effects have been on the lives of these separated families, on the lives of the children who are still separated, and what a new version of this policy could look like under an incoming Trump administration.
So you mentioned that number of one thousand and fifty two the shows up at the end of the movie Maria, And what's crazy is that numbers even higher than it was when we locked picture on the film.
I figure today the.
Number of children without confirmed reunifications for the Trump family separation policy is at three hundred and sixty kids without confirmed reunifications. And you know, it was warned at the time of the policy that they could be permanent orphans.
And to just sort of rewind here, there were operators, many of whom were coming back to government now back in the Obama administration, people like Tom Homan who wanted to implement a family separation policy, and it was proposed and it was rejected by the Homeland Security officials at the time, namely Jay Johnson, who was the Secretary of Homeland Security and one of his deputies, all one Hundre Maiorchis,
who today is the Secretary of Homeland Security. But you know, as early as Valentine's Day twenty seventeen, and you'll see it in this film, a bunch of these folks got in a room at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington.
D C.
And they almost in a gleeful way, proposed again bringing back this idea of a family separation policy. And almost immediately, do you guys know this, down in the Elpaso sector of the border patrol, early on in twenty seventeen, they started separating kids even before this was an official policy.
And it wasn't until the spring of twenty eighteen when the policy sort of burst out into public consciousness, and ultimately the ACLU says, fifty five hundred children were taken away from their parents deliberately for no other reason than to hurt them, to scare other people from coming to this country. And obviously, you know, we all know that policy failed spectacularly, and I should say it wasn't a failure for the fifty five hundred kids who went through this.
They are going to have a lifetime of trauma. They were subjected to government sanctioned child abuse, in the words of the American Academy of Pediatrics. But it failed because punishment has never stopped people from coming to the United States of America in search of a better life for safety, and that goes for Democratic and Republican presidents. We can go through all of this. But you know as well
as I do, better than I do that. You know, Bill Clinton created this prevention through de terrence model.
Our administration that's moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring.
George W.
Bush supersized the border patrol when he created DHS.
Dozens of agencies charged with homeland security will now be located within one cabinet department with the mandate and legal authority to protect our people.
Barack Obama deported more people than any president in history, and.
No matter how decent they are, no matter there are reasons, the eleven million who broke these laws should be held accountable, which.
Is why, like that Donald Trump was able to separate all those thousands of children from their parents.
The system was set up that way.
Yep.
And here we are today again with the specter of mass deportations looming. I reported from the floor of the Conventions. I saw those signs up close, right in front of my face. And mass deportation is family separation by another name. It's not ripping kids away from their parents at the border, but it is ripping parents away from kids in the interior. What we're about to see has actually already played at happened before fan separation, and it's about to happen again.
You know, Paola, when this was happening, I remember saying family separation is actually part of American history.
Right.
Let's be clear. They took Indigenous children away from their parents, they took enslaved black children away from their parents, yes, they took Japanese American children, yes, and separated. So it's been a historic thing. Bo, It's not new, definitely.
And I think that's why this film is so important now because I think you are reminding people of that moral outrage that people felt in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen and right before the twenty twenty election, right, And in a way, this film I wish it would have been sort of released before. But I think that's why this is important to have this conversation now, to go back to what you saw back then, so that people remember what's about to happen.
Right.
And so I'm thinking, Jacob, of that clip that we see in the film of you walking through that detention center in McAllen. Obviously it was facilitated through Katie Miller, right who that was.
Invited by Steven Miller's wife. It's like unbelieve they fell in love over the family separation policy, got married after it.
Incredible love story.
So take us back inside that detention center, like, tell us once again what you saw back then.
It was two days, Paula.
It was June thirteenth, twenty eighteen, and I was in Los Angeles and Katie Waldman then Katie Waldman, who became Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's now wife, said you got to get down and see family separations, you know, for yourself. And I went inside the former Walmart it was called Casa Padre in Brownsville, two hundred and fifty thousand square feet and there was one thousand boys inside, ten to
seventeen years old, maybe more than a thousand. Actually most of them were there only because they had been separated from their parents. It was over capacity, you know. All I could think about was this place is called the shelter, but I'm looking at these kids and they're incarcerated here. And then a couple days later she invited me back again to go in the epicenter of separations on Father's Day to Ursula, the Central Processing Center in McCallan, Texas.
And that is where I saw what we all know now, kids locked up in cages on the concrete floors, supervised by security contractors, literally in a watchtower, under those milar blankets, and I'll never forget it.
Let's go live now to MSNBC's Jacob Soberoff and McCallen, Texas. Jacob, you have been one of the very few journalists allowed to see one of the facilities where these migrant children are being held.
Tell us what.
It is that we can't see.
This is the first time ever that children have been separated on a systematic basis. Look at those photos right there from their parents, and that is because of the Trump administration. People in here are locked up in cages essentially what looked like animal kennels.
I don't know any other way to describe it. That's what they wanted us to see. It was no cameras, it was pad and paper only, and they wanted us to come outside and say what we had seen to scare people from coming and also scare Congress into an acting stricter immigration laws, and I look back now and Erin Morris asked me, film, so you're a tool. Basically you went in there and did their bidding. And what I said to him was Bigley, It's true, as Donald
Trump might say. But what happened after that is I think what inspires me actually about that moment in time, but also about this film and about where we're headed. People stood up all around the world in reaction to what they saw, and it wasn't a bipartisan outrage.
It was a universal outrage. The Pope spoke out.
If you remember, hundreds of thousands of people were in the street after we came out of those facilities, and importantly,
I didn't mention. Ginger Thompson published that audio with Pro Publica, and everybody heard the cries of the children in the border patrol, mocking them inside those border patrol stations, and the world stood up and forced Donald Trump on June twentieth, twenty eighteen into basically it is most significant, if not the only major policy reversal of his first term, which was he stood down on family separation, and he didn't
say I was morally appalled by what happened. He said, I didn't like the site and the feeling of the families being separated. He didn't like what was going down on television or the audio that he was hearing coming through.
And I think it's a lesson.
It's a lesson looking backwards, and it's a lesson thinking about this time period we're about to go through right now.
Jacob. I believe the term that I use when we see the children who have now been released right and are being taken from one place to another, I believe that's government trafficking of children. And I just want to wonder if we're on the same page if you call it that too.
Look, I go by what the experts have said, and what the experts have said is not only as I mentioned, the Republican appointed judge called it one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the country, but the American Academy of Pediatrics at the time said it was government sanctioned child abuse. Physicians for human rights, Nobel Peace Prize winning organizations said what the Trump administration did to
those children met the United Nations definition of torture. You know, we've all talked to children who have gone through this policy. They will live with a lifetime of trauma that can never be undone, no matter how much financial restitution. By the way, most of them aren't getting any because the Biden administration's fighting them court nor psychological treatment that they
will get. You hear in the film Jonathan White and Jalen Sulog, two career civil servants who did everything they could to help stop this policy, say this is what they warned their superiors was going to happen, that they were going to damage these children irreparably, and they went forward with it anyway. And that's sort of the level of I think, you know, intentionality. People will sometimes say, well, how do you, as a journalist use the word cruel.
Go look at the documents, You see the emails on the screen in the film. This is what they were intending to do. They didn't want to reunite children when they were starting to be reunited with their parents. One official called it a fiasco. The other one said, this undermines the entire effort when the families were being put back together after separation, instead of deporting the parents without the children. It was the point, and it's non opinion.
It's just an objective fact. When you look at the emails, You hear what they said, you listen to the officials who warned about the policy.
This was the point.
I can't help but think about this idea that since you were reporting in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, how much have we changed as a country? Like have we become
numb now? When we're talking about this? And I guess my question to both of you, Maria as well, is do you believe or do you expect that when Holman walks in, and when Steven Miller walks in, and when we see a more aggressive iteration of what has already been documented, do we expect this country to still have the same collective moral outrage as the one that we saw years ago.
I wish I could say absolutely. In fact, I'm just going to be straight up honest, because I am right. We're a journalists. So I went to get a manicure today.
By the way, I love a good many Petty. I'm just gonna admit it.
Also, So while I'm at the MANI petty this morning here in Harlem, and I'm looking around and these are women who I know. They're all immigrants. Of course I don't know their status because no one knows anybody's status. And I just put out, I did a little social media thing. I was like, Aha, all the lovely ladies who went to vote for Donald Trump and who love to go get their mani petties from all the immigrant women. Will they even notice if they're gone? Do they even care?
Because of course you cannot tell our status by looking at us, and so it's like, will they go out and use their bodies? As Dolores Werta says, it's all about people power, right, you have to put your body where your politics are. I don't know, and I hate to say that. I wish I could say yes. I know that in some immigrant communities, people are getting prepared. There's trainings about what to do when ice appears. They are getting ready. They know your rights training skin, they
know your rights trainings. So it's getting very ugly. But the answer to the question is will there be an outpouring? I don't know. But then again, our country is very unpredictable, right There has been massive demonstrations across our country too, so you know, anything could happen in some ways. Wait a minute about let me ask you about your reporting, because you spent election night with mixed status families in
Arizona when you were reporting for Telemundo and MSNBC. So right now, according to ford US, there are about twenty two million people living in the United States in mixed status families. Right, We're going to go to a clip from your visit to the home of the ed nandis family.
There sign Donald Trump nass Me and.
My husband we have talked about maybe just moving to a different country.
You would literally well someone would say, is self deport You've been thinking.
Right, I feel like my parents and our whole family has contributed so much, you know, to this country. You know, having a business, having businesses here, paying tax is like giving so much and still dealing with so much racism and so much hate towards our community.
So a BAOUTA what have you heard from undocumented people and activists since you're reporting? Then, what's the sense of Okay, this man is now in power and now this stuff is really going to happen. What are you hearing?
I feel like I'm hearing two sides of the same story. Right.
There's the one side, which is the story of resilience. Right, and in a place like Maricopa County in Arizona. I think, and we've talked about this before, I think the grassroots movement feels confident enough that they have the infrastructure that's necessary to protect their people.
Now, this isn't you for them.
They've obviously lived through the air of Juripio, and so when they say like we are home, they mean it. But then on the other side, I think the fear is inevitable. A lot of the families that I talked to are actively considering things like self deportation, which is precisely sort of the heart of the Republican's strategy. It's still so much and still so much uncertainty, and this idea of chaos that in and of itself will will
drive people away. I mean, as we know, during our Pio and sp ten seventy there was a mass exodus, so many folks went to New Mexico and other states. But now the question that people have is where do you go, right if in fact they do implement these mass importations. And so I think it's a combination of those two things. I know, I keep obsessing around this
idea of like how will people react? But this is when Jacob I think of the difference of like ourselves as journalists and in the mediums that we typically use. And then suddenly, what is the difference of now exposing this story through this medium, you know, through this type of like narrative see in this this word in English. I can't say vignetes, vignette vignettes exactly.
You just said it exactly.
Oh, give it, let me say it again.
We're not perfect.
No, But my question is as a journalist, now that you've been able to work with this incredible Hollywood filmmaker, what have you learned about the power storytelling? No, when thinking about these families that Mariias asking me about and how we can get other folks to sort of understand what's at stake, what have you learned around like filmmaking and.
Sort of the power that Hollywood has that we don't have.
Honestly, Actually, the movie is a perfect example of this because Errol Morris, in all the films he's ever made, you know, he does these forensic analyzes of bureaucracy, and this film is that, but he also employs narrative vignettes and the idea of using fictionalized characters to sort of fill in the blanks.
And in this film.
He does it to depict a mother and a son who are separated from one another after coming from Guatemala.
To the United States.
And the reason he does it, to your question, is that the footage doesn't exist of families being separated in real time in those detention centers that we went into. I was sent into those facilities, specifically without a camera, with a patent paper to come out and describe it, but not to show it, and was hand a propaganda foot by the US government in order to show it. So what Erl has done he employed the tactics of using fiction and tells the story to get to an
emotional truth through narrative filmmaking. And like I said, I hope one day every single one of the fifty five hundred kids is going to be able to speak out on their own like the Shoa Foundation did for survivors of the Holocaust, but in their own time and in their own way. And so what Erol has done is filled in the gaps of the bureaucratic mess that was family separation with a narrative story that depicts this mother and child.
In the way really that only he can.
And so I guess that's part of what I'm thinking about going forward, how do you tell those stories in the absence of being inside those places? Is there a way to have families tell their own stories? Is there a way to get inside? But also, if he had picked one particular family today, what would happen to them? They'd have a huge target on their backs by the
Trump administration sactly. Remember, the families that were separated by Trump and were reunified by Biden are only here with thirty six months rolling parole.
None of them have permanent.
Legal status, and so at any time, virtually all those families, if they haven't gotten a green card or found their way to attract the citizenship, are at risk of deportation after separation by Trump in the first term. So I don't have an easy answer. I think it's a case by case situation. I remember, during what we thought was going to be the downfall of DOC in twenty seventeen, I went to a campus with a documented student and we walked around in between classes live on MSNBC and
talked like you did an election night. What are people who are in the crosshairs of these policies comfortable with?
Number one is the.
First question, the most important question, and then number two, how do you do it in a way that tells the truth to people about what's really happening in the country. Because I do believe that people endorse mass deportations, but what I don't believe is they really understand what mass deportations are right, and what the ramifications of mass deportations are, and how when they're reminded it's actually really a supersizing of family separation that we all saw and were morally
outraged by in twenty eighteen. I think a lot of people who say in those polls, yeah, I'm all for mass deportation are going to think differently.
That's because they just think that, you know, yeah, those gang members go mass support them, and it's like, again, we don't have at that point, we don't have an immigration problem. If we have ten million gang members running around, we have a crime problem, and we don't have a crime problem.
That's exactly right. And you remember Maria who used the line Felon's not families. Wasn't Trump first, it was Obama, and that led to more people being deported than any president in the history of the United States exactly.
So the thing about it that both of you know, but our listeners may not. Is that when they have that list of who they're going to go get the roundup, they're doing this overnight. They're arriving in people's homes when I witness this, and actually in La they are taking people from their homes at five o'clock in the morning, so nobody sees it. And that's part of the point. We can't get in with cameras any longer, and so then the story can't be told.
What's been interesting even just being in Miami for the last couple of days. Now suddenly the narrative is changing, right. It used to be deport them all, and now suddenly you're starting to hear people say no, no, no, no, but a solus criminale.
Sol criminals only.
And now is when it starts to become very real, because now it's when suddenly folks are looking around them and they're understanding how immigration is deeply personal.
Really you can't really escape it.
Now your nanny may be undocumented and while you're the teachers has daka and and very often I've heard folks that that I know employee undocumented folks in their houses that are starting to say the same thing.
Well, they're not going to go after after her, right because she's one of the good ones.
And so, like I've said in the past, it's no longer up to any voter to decide who looks American enough or.
Not, or or who's who's lading or not.
Like now it will be up to the Tom Holmans of the world, who have already been extremely clear and said pack up your bags. Yeah, and he didn't specify who, and you know who's part of that.
It's it's a general statement.
And define criminal.
You know, this criminal needs exactly you walked across the border.
In between ports of entry there you go. That how you're defining criminals.
That's how they define criminals.
So you're defining it as a violent crime.
That's exactly right.
And so that's not a small finite number of people, guys.
So Jacob, let's talk a little bit about policy, right, because a lot of these far right figures are going to come back. Right, They're going to be in the administration Stephen Miller, of course, the mastermind of the entire policy, who is clearly openly embracing white supremacist policies racist ideologies. What is going to happen when they are now again back into determining policy in the US government. What are you expecting?
What I learned in covering the famous separation policy and then writing the book, and then especially making the film and watching Errol Morris's interviews, you know, and whenever morese interview with somebody, you see into their soul because of the way he does it. He created a device called the terotron where they look directly into it, and they're looking at his face and he's looking at theirs as
they're doing the interview. And there's an interview in the film with Scott Lloyd, who was the political appointee who is the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement for the Trump administration. He was an anti abortion activist before he was charged with taking care and custody of all of the unaccompanied, ostensibly migrant children in the custody of
the United States government. And what was happening with Scott Lloyd is that he was in direct contact And I cannot state enough how unusual it is, and this is very clear in the movie, how a non senate confirmed, junior level political appointee was in direct contact with people like Steven Miller in the White House back and forth emails. You see him on the screen, Steven Miller and Scott
Lloyd talking to one another about immigration policy. This is a junior level political appointee in the government in direct touch with one of the most senior advisors to the president in the United States about his policies like family separation. This was one example in the first Trump term. And now Stephen Miller, you know, will have more power to continue to reach out to the people like Scott Lloyd.
And if they do what you know twenty twenty five said, and get rid of a lot of these sort of career officials that stood in the way of the political appointees, it will only be bigger and more impactful than we have ever seen.
What is the intention of this film now that it's being released in weeks before inauguration, after the election, What do you want people to take from this?
You know, I've seen the film a lot.
We screened it I think in twenty five cities theatrically before the election, and there's a screen in Mexico City next week, in London and January we have this big
premiere on MSNBC on Saturday. What I hope after watching it now after the election several times, is the way I feel today sticks with people, rather than the way I felt before the election, which was a lot more We started this conversation talking about anxiety I actually feel, and maybe it's my privilege in the position that I sit in, but a lot more hopeful when I think back to this story than I did before the election.
I think about those moments when I saw the film for the first time and I was reminded of the hundreds of thousands of people who were in the streets and what that looked like and what it felt like, and knowing that it was the people that stopped the
policy from happening ultimately, and the President admitted that. When I think about Jonathan White and Jalen Sulog and James de la Cruz, and I have listed a dozen people in my head who are career government officials that did everything they could to stop the policy from happening, I feel hopeful. I feel worried for those people, but I feel hopeful that people like that are inside, you know,
fighting for what's morally right. And I think it's okay as a reporter to say that you don't have to be air quotes fair or neutral about ripping children away deliberately from their parents as a tool of US immigration policy. And I think the film today, for me, more than ever before, is a reminder that it was the people of this country and people around the world who stood
up and stopped it. It was like we had X ray vision for just that time in the summer of twenty eighteen, and it was like, I can see exactly what the immigration system has done for decades to people, and it went away. People wanted to know less. And I hope that it reminds people that knowing Morris is a good thing, and it reminds them of the power that we all have, you know, as citizens, non citizens, for just fellow human beings.
Hell yes, Jacob Sobaroff. The film Separated, premiering this weekend. It's so great to have you on in the Thick with me and Bauda. Thank you so much for joining us.
I love you guys, sincerely, Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
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In the Thick is produced by Aria Goodman, Innes Renique, and Tasha San Noel. Our executive producers are myself and Penny Lei Ramirez, who, by the way, just delivered a baby girl. Yay Benni le We love you, enjoy your time off. Our audio engineer is Leah Shaw Damaran, Our marketing manager is Luis Luna and along with Bao La Ramus, I'm your co host Maria jo Josa and Yatu Saves not Devayas.
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