Errol Morris has made documentaries about some of the most consequential figures of American politics, from Robert S. McNamara (The Fog of War) to Donald Rumsfeld (The Unknown Known) to, more recently, Steve Bannon (American Dharma). He’s taken on global conflicts, biological warfare, and the horrific images and stories to come out of Abu Ghraib. But hearing the Oscar-winning filmmaker talk about his new movie, Separated (premiering Thursday at the Venice International Film Festival), one senses a particular emotional investment in the material. “It’s hard for me not to believe that these policies were motivated by meanness,” he says of the subject covered by the film. “There’s no pragmatic element in it at all.”
Separated examines the origins, impact, and aftermath of the family separation policy instituted during Donald Trump’s presidency. To execute this extreme measure of immigration border control, as Morris explains, “parents were forced to betray their children.” The film—a coproduction between NBC News Studios, Participant, Fourth Floor, and Moxie Pictures—presents interviews with figures intimately involved with the policy, both those who regret it and those who seemingly do not. It features uncovered emails and documents that detail in startling plainness how such a policy came to be. A 2020 book of the same name by Jacob Soboroff, an NBC News political and national correspondent, helps provide the movie’s backbone.
Morris first tweeted about Soboroff’s book shortly after its publication. Soboroff then reached out to Participant Media’s Diane Weyermann (who died in 2021) in the hopes of connecting with Morris; she suggested calling the director directly, which Soboroff did. “I said, ‘I’m not asking you to make a film, but if I ever did, do you have any advice?’” Soboroff recalls. “Errol said something to the effect of, ‘Would you like to make a film?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’” More specifically, says Morris: “I remember Jacob asking if I knew anybody who might want to turn the book into a movie—and I suggested myself.”
The book’s power rests in Soboroff’s reportage. He’d first heard Trump adviser Stephen Miller offhandedly pose family separation as an idea during the 2016 presidential campaign, and barely understood what the idea meant. But as Soboroff investigated the actual action at the border, following Trump’s election victory—images of children in cages, with no clue where their parents were—he attacked the issue with rigor, examining how more than 5,000 migrant families were forcibly separated at the border. “I wrote the book because I didn’t understand how such a horrific policy could be put into place by the United States government, how it was allowed to happen, and how it was executed—I was looking for those answers,” Soboroff says.
Morris comes at the material uniquely. The policy is now somewhat in the rearview mirror, even as its consequences have hardly been resolved, and unfortunately relevant once more as the notion of another Trump administration reviving family separation has clouded the 2024 campaign.
Recent estimates have shown that more than 1,000 children remain separated from their families, even as Trump put an end to the policy well before the end of his term amid immense public pressure. “I felt that the policies were grotesque and that something should be said about them,” Morris says. “The issues that produce these policies remain with us, and the draconian attempts to solve them remain with us as well.”
Morris knows how to get under a subject’s skin. He’s a persistent, impassioned, crafty interviewer, finding the cinematic in the confessional. Yet he’s not always aware when his methods are succeeding. Case in point: His conversations for Separated with Scott Lloyd, who was the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement while the policy was active. In the movie, they are riveting in their opacity. Lloyd appears utterly unmoved, unable to come to terms with his role in family separation. He admits to Morris that even he was surprised by his hiring. (“His main credential was [that] he was against abortion,” Morris cracks.) Lloyd’s silence, agonizingly captured on camera, is at the core of Separated’s argument.
But in the moment? “When I was doing the interview, I was absolutely convinced it was the worst interview that I had ever done—a truly, truly execrable attempt at interviewing another person,” Morris says. “When it was edited, it turned out to be—I’m not going to say surprisingly good; that’s not quite right. But surprisingly revealing.”
Lloyd is one of several officials identified by Separated who were given responsibility that was not commensurate with their qualifications. There’s a moral indignancy to the movie’s presentation of these staffing choices given their profound impact on actual human lives. “[They] had limited experience, limited abilities, limited concerns,” Morris says. “You like to think of your public figures as having some kind of clue about what they’re doing and about the nature of their responsibilities.” Morris also speaks with ORR employees who, by contrast, candidly express regret and outrage at what they were made to be a part of.
This is vintage Morris, even as the film pulses with a political urgency: “I’m really fascinated by what people are really thinking—what did they think they were doing? Did they have any understanding, or was it an intentional obtusity of the kind of harm that they were doing?”
He comes to some striking conclusions in Separated but inevitably didn’t get as far as he’d hoped. Trump’s head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the family-separation policy, Thomas Homan, is considered one of its “founding fathers,” as Soboroff puts it. Morris nearly interviewed him. “We were shooting in the studio, south of Boston, and he made the hour-long trip down to the studio,” Morris says. “He got to the studio, and then declined to be interviewed, which is a new one for me…sitting in a room waiting to be interviewed, and refusing ever to appear in front of the camera.”
While this almost-interview doesn’t make the film, it speaks to Morris’s inquiry. “I hate to go hyperbolic on you, but it’s a study in a certain kind of fascism, and I never know whether people are lying or lying to themselves,” Morris says. An executive producer on the movie, Soboroff concurs, putting the policy in the sobering terms of a reporter who’s spent nearly a decade covering the subject. “This really is one of the most shameful chapters in modern American history.”
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(672x354:674x356)/Tinashe-122224-tout-cf355934effe41b88828d7c0b016616f.jpg?w=350&resize=350,250&ssl=1 "Tinashe Gets Into Jingle Ball Spirit in Miami, Plus Billie Eilish, Finneas, Richard Gere and More")
