Author Soboroff calls forced family separations an ongoing American tragedy
Club President Michael Freedman, left, introduces reporter Jacob Soboroff at a virtual event Thursday. Photo: Alan Kotok
NBC News and MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff said Thursday at a National Press Club Headliners event that he wanted the world to know of children ripped from their families, how some were caged and some were babies in diapers that social workers were ordered not to touch or hold under the President Donald Trump's “zero-tolerance” immigration policy.
The reporter described visiting an immigration detention facility in Brownsville, Texas, in June 2018, with only a small blue spiral-bound notebook, leaving behind his camera and microphone. Inside were nearly 1,500 boys forcibly separated from their parents, many lying under mylar blankets as contract officers stood guard from a watchtower. Others crowded onto the former Walmart’s loading dock watching a Disney movie.
The American Academy of Pediatrics called the separation policy government-sanctioned child abuse, Soboroff said.
What Soboroff saw and reported two years ago helped end the forced separation of families and led to his writing a 2020 New York Times bestseller, “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.” Only a court order forced the Trump administration to reunite those families.
His book told the odyssey of Juan and Jose, not their real names, a father and son from Guatemala separated at the border for about five months. Soboroff interviewed them in prisons and detention centers.
Soboroff said he returned to Yuma, Arizona, where Juan had once been held and Trump was to visit, more than a month ago. When he told Juan his plans, he was asked if he saw Trump “to please ask him two questions: Why did you arrest us, and why did you traumatize us?”
No accurate account exists today of how many children were separated from their families, remain separated or were reunited.
Soboroff blamed both political parties for the human toll of immigration policy failures. He calls it a decades-long American tragedy. The Obama administration deported more immigrants than any prior administration and built the cages at the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center.
But Trump, he said, “super-sized” the operation by systematically separating children from their parents, a policy the Obama administration once considered and rejected. White House senior adviser Stephen Miller was quoted as saying it would be “un-American not to move forward with family separations.”
Soboroff said that deterrence is not going to stop people from leaving their homes in search of a better life.
Climate change or climate variability has created poverty, in part devastating the coffee industry, and forced people to flee. Malnutrition and gang violence also are pushing people from their homeland.
What was done to separate families and cage children someday will be recorded among the horrors America has perpetuated along with slavery, the destruction of Native Americans and the internment of Japanese Americans, he said.
For his reporting, he received the 2019 Walter Cronkite Award for Individual Achievement by a national journalist and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Award for Broadcast Journalism.