Errol Morris and Jacob Soboroff discuss their new film, “Separated,” which chronicles the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” immigration policy, which separated more than 4,500 children from their parents between 2017 and 2019. 1,300 children are yet to be reunited due to incomplete information on their families, because “the idea was to avoid records,” says Morris.
1300 kids have parents trying to claim them. There is no way they couldn’t have significantly reduced those numbers through maternity/paternity testing. Which doesn’t take that long to do anymore.
The ones you’d be left with are the guardians , probably aunts/uncles or older cousins and siblings. Siblings you could probably test for.
At that point, what can you do? Even if we put everyone involved in separating the children in jail for the rest of their lives all the way up, it will never reunite the families they separated.
The saddest part to me is that it often makes me think that people somehow forget what it’s like being a child. Like they just purposefully forgot their childhood, not because of trauma, but because they deemed it a hindrance to hold on to.
You know what, I hadn’t even thought about that.
1300 kids have parents trying to claim them. There is no way they couldn’t have significantly reduced those numbers through maternity/paternity testing. Which doesn’t take that long to do anymore.
The ones you’d be left with are the guardians , probably aunts/uncles or older cousins and siblings. Siblings you could probably test for.
At that point, what can you do? Even if we put everyone involved in separating the children in jail for the rest of their lives all the way up, it will never reunite the families they separated.
The saddest part to me is that it often makes me think that people somehow forget what it’s like being a child. Like they just purposefully forgot their childhood, not because of trauma, but because they deemed it a hindrance to hold on to.