For evil to triumph sometimes all it takes is for good men to get massively bogged down in emails with faceless bureaucrats.
That’s one read on Errol Morris’s scathing critique on the Trump administration’s profoundly cruel policy of forced separation for the mostly Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran families that crossed the border without visas in the late 2010s. It’s a story of dehumanisation, children in cages, and the blurting, vote-craving policy-making of government by id – and it’s shattering to experience.
The good man here – and he is a genuine hero – is whistleblower Jonathan White. A senior member of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), he fought back against Donald Trump’s undeclared war on illegal migrants. White is the articulate moral core around which Morris builds a quietly furious documentary that traces the enactment of a law that no one remotely thought through.
The plan, as formulated by Trump’s brains trust, was to deter wannabe migrants by turning the ORR, Homeland Security and ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) into child-catchers. They took babies, toddlers and older kids from their parents and placed them in detention centres. Only, no one was keeping track of who was who – the toddlers could only say ‘momma’, the then-acting head of Homeland Security points out – and there was never any evidence of a deterrent effect. Thousands of young children were kept from their parents for months, causing untold trauma. Some are still to be reunited.
It’s shattering to experience
As forensic and cool-headed as a deeply pissed-off documentary can get, Separated leads you deep into the weeds of public policy, public relations and behind-closed-doors horse-trading – usually with Trump policy wonk Stephen Miller lurking somewhere in the shadows like an undernourished vampire.
It’s tough to make this stuff – emails, meeting minutes, letters, acronyms – cinematic. And for all the arty cutaways and aerial shots of the menacing, shark-finned border wall, Morris fails to match his great Robert McNamara doc The Fog of War for turning policy into pictures. He centres the migrants via a single dramatic reconstruction when an interview or two would have given them more of a voice in their own story and been a lot less cheesy.
Separated is not a partisan work, more a humanist one. NBC reporter Jacob Soboroff, another of Morris’s talking heads, broke the story and wrote a 2020 book about it, ‘Separated: Inside an American Tragedy’, and he helps Morris build a case against the Biden administration too. The film’s opening credits draw a thread from the Clinton administration onwards, setting the scene for a tragedy many years in the making.
A picture emerges of a small band of dedicated government workers fighting a battle they never expected against vastly more powerful forces: to stop a lot of very young children being imprisoned, alone, in a foreign country.
The conclusion is sobering, too: we’re in an election year – is all this about to happen again?
Separated premiered at the Venice Film Festival.