I am an unlikely eyewitness to one of the most shameful chapters in modern American history. The Trump administration’s deliberate and systematic separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents was, according to humanitarian groups and child welfare experts, an unparalleled abuse of the human rights of children. The American Academy of Pediatrics says the practice will leave thousands of kids traumatized for life. I was there to see it myself, though I didn’t expect to be and, as a journalist, almost missed the story entirely. What I saw now is forever seared into my memory.
Though the Trump administration had been carrying out widespread family separations at the border for more than a year, the horror separated families endured set in for me personally on the thirteenth day of June 2018. I could feel the thickness of the air as soon as I walked off our United Airlines flight at the tiny Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport in South Texas, the early summer steam of the Rio Grande Valley sneaking in between the weak seal connecting the jet bridge and the plane. The gray marine layer that draped my hometown of Los Angeles when I took off no longer seemed worth complaining about as sweat started dripping down my back.
As producer Aarne Heikkila and I headed up the ramp, I pulled off the sweatshirt I flew in, my T-shirt now sticking to my skin even as we made our way through the air-conditioned terminal toting our carry-ons. I’m probably going to get sick, I thought to myself. We headed past the baggage claim, out the doors, under a row of palm trees, and across a small parking lot to pick up our rented minivan.
We had rushed to Brownsville, not far from where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, after being invited by a Trump administration official to tour what is known as Casa Padre with several other journalists. Its name reflected the street it was on, meant to honor the Spanish priest who, in 1804, established the first permanent settlement on the southern tip of a nearby island. Literally translated, it means Father’s House. We’d soon learn how regrettably misnamed the facility was.
The 250,000-square-foot former Walmart—what we were told was a “shelter”—was holding nearly fifteen hundred migrant boys, ten to seventeen years old, hundreds of whom had been separated from their parents as a direct result of Donald Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy. By then the existence and execution of Trump’s family separations had been widely reported, but no journalist had seen the realities from the inside. I was anxious.
On the four-mile drive from the airport, I asked Aarne to pull over at a Walgreens so I could run inside to buy a car charger for my laptop. I figured it was going to be a long night and we’d be waiting in the car in between live shots. I paced the aisles looking for one. No luck, but I grabbed a little blue notebook (no cameras would be allowed inside), some dry shampoo (I’m a TV reporter with curly hair about to do a live shot in ninety-degree humidity), and a cold Gatorade (for mysterious reasons the yellow flavor calms my nerves). Aarne picked up a bag of almonds, like he always does when we’re on assignment.
We paid and were on our way. In minutes I’d bear witness to the reality that our country, under the direction of President Donald Trump, was ripping parents and children apart. Casa Padre would become the scene of international breaking news later that night.
IT HAS NOW been two years since I walked into Casa Padre with that Walgreens notebook. After its pages were filled with four different stories, it lived on my desk at home for months, a reminder of the tragedy it had helped me document.
In late 2018, as my wife, son, and I were moving out of our rental and into our first home, I put the “memo book,” as it says on the front in big bold type, in a bag with other valuable possessions and brought it to a storage locker. A year later, as I began writing this book, I went and dug the bag out from under boxes of Christmas decorations. With my iPhone flashlight I found the notebook at the bottom of the bag. Holding it in my hand for the first time in months made my heart race. The reporting inside, by President Trump’s own admission, contributed to his ending systematic family separations. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” the president said while signing the executive order that stopped the policy he had claimed days earlier did not exist.
The notebook burned in my hand. Inside the five-by-ten-foot storage unit, surrounded by camping equipment and a baby-changing table and a pendant lamp that was gathering dust, I sat on a stool and flipped open its tiny cover to the first page of spiral-bound lined paper. If someone else found these fifty pages of chicken scratch they’d have no idea what they were looking at. I barely needed to read a word to bring back the sights and sounds and feelings of being there.
As of
Friday June 8—11,214 migrants
in UAC [Unaccompanied Alien Children] program—avg length
56 days
Translation: the U.S. government was overwhelmed by an influx of kids—many of whom couldn’t be released because their parents could not be found. I kept going, stopping again on the sixth page.
kids everywhere
oreos
applesauce
smile at them—they “feel like animals in a cage being looked at”
I recognized those details as among the first I revealed when I walked outside Casa Padre to a TV camera and told my MSNBC colleague, anchor Chris Hayes, and the world what I saw inside.
“This place is called a shelter, but effectively these kids are incarcerated.”
A monitor was set up to the side of the camera, and I could see the breaking news banner at the bottom of the screen. It read NBC NEWS TOURS IMMIGRANT CHILD DETENTION CENTER. The notebook now in my hands was then tucked in my pocket, during the first live national report about the conditions of separated children in government custody.
I brought it with me days later when, on Father’s Day, I toured the Ursula Border Patrol Central Processing Station, not far away in McAllen, Texas, where more children were separated from their parents than anywhere else on the border. There they shut families into what a Border Patrol agent told me were “pods,” a generous description. My notes hastily captured what I learned.
Child could
get moved even
If parent
back in a day
The Trump administration was potentially “creating thousands of immigrant orphans,” as a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement put it, by deporting separated parents before they were given a chance to reunite. When I closed my notebook that day in South Texas, I walked outside and again detailed on national TV what I saw: “People in here are locked up in cages, essentially what look like animal kennels. I don’t know any other way to describe it.”
I still don’t. I can’t recall why, but I left a few pages in the middle of the notebook blank until I took notes during my first phone call with Lindsay Toczylowski, the lawyer who represented a separated three-year-old who, she said, “started climbing up on the table” in court. On that call, she clued me in to the Trump administration’s lack of a plan to reunite families.
Everyone has been
told nothing about
next steps
Toczylowski later introduced me to one of the parents she was describing at the time, Juan, who alleged he was coerced into signing away the right to reunify with his son, José. Their story appears throughout this book. I’ve spent hours with them recounting details of their almost five-month-long separation, a living nightmare in which, in his words, the United States government “treated us like animals, like dogs.” At their request I’ve changed their names to ones they picked, in order to protect themselves and their family from the danger they told me (and the United States government) they were fleeing. The image on the cover was taken near the location where they crossed into the United States before being separated, nearly a decade before they arrived together.
The final pages of my notebook became home to what I saw and learned inside the San Diego courtroom where a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite separated families. That case, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is still ongoing today. At the time, Sarah Fabian, the government lawyer who later became famous for arguing migrant kids don’t need blankets or toothbrushes, called in to the hearing and was asked to provide a number of separated family members facing deportation.
Fabian! Latest #’s
Executable 1,000!
Two exclamation points. At the time it all felt noteworthy. I did not plan or expect to be there, at the heart of it all, when the nation finally noticed the American government was systematically separating migrant families in unprecedented numbers.
Since the summer of 2017, the Trump administration has taken at least 5,556 kids from their parents. But still today, nobody knows for sure exactly how many families have been separated. In February 2020, the United States Government Accountability Office noted, “it is unclear the extent to which Border Patrol has accurate records of separated [families] in its data system.” Scarce few of their stories have been told. Most will never be. There are families who were quickly put back together, and children who were, as predicted, permanently orphaned. My one little blue notebook could never do all their stories justice, nor is this book an attempt to. I encourage you to seek out, read, and learn about what happened from as many sources as you can.
That first report from outside Casa Padre went viral, my tweets from outside the shelter before and after my tour amassing tens of millions of impressions and tens of thousands of retweets, even before I went to sleep that evening. Tens of thousands of new people started following me on Twitter that night. Maybe you were one of them. Many of those new followers tweet me with links and leads and questions to this day.
As I continued covering family separations and the fallout, I obsessively tracked the number of children the Trump administration was reuniting and those it deemed “ineligible” for reunification by routinely checking PACER, the online documents portal of the federal court system, for any status updates posted by the government or the ACLU. Every time I posted the latest court-ordered update about the number of separated children still in U.S. custody, I received a social media signal boost from people around the world who invested time and energy in following the details of what was happening. Without them, this story would not have received the attention it did, long after most national reporters left the border, nor would this book be possible.
After having missed the slow-motion lead-up to this disaster, I became fixated on the policy and how it shattered so many lives. To those who have spent far longer than I have chronicling or experiencing life along the border, the answer was obvious: family separations were an extreme extension of decades of harsh policies aimed at keeping Mexican and Central American migrants from entering the United States, at a time when racists and xenophobes said they felt emboldened by the commander in chief. But why was its implementation, according to healthcare professionals, so needlessly cruel? Why was its ending so astonishingly sloppy? And why were its ramifications so ill-considered? Finding the answers to those questions is why I decided to write this book.
What follows is my attempt to fill in the blanks that I did not understand in real time. I started by revisiting my notes, as well as my public reporting, seeking to retrace my steps over two years. I pored through hundreds of pages of documents, obtained by myself and others, including NGOs doggedly filing public records requests. Still more files have been made publicly available through investigations by inspectors general and Congress. To contextualize these documents, I spoke with dozens of sources, from those responsible for considering, implementing, then unwinding the policy, to others who were caught in its crosshairs. I heard from people who participated in and experienced the policy on the border, and some of those who directed it from Washington, including, at times, from inside the White House itself.
What I have now unequivocally learned is that the Trump administration’s family separation policy was an avoidable catastrophe made worse by people who could have made it better at multiple inflection points, which I’ll share with you here in a series of pivotal moments presented as scenes. The dialogue you’ll read in these pages is reconstructed, when I was present, to the best of my memory or using recordings made as part of my reporting. Where I was not a firsthand witness or participant, I rely on the retelling of moments by sources who were, cross-referencing their version of events with others who were present or had knowledge of what transpired when possible. Some of those sources considered my reporting adversarial at the time the policy was carried out, but agreed to speak with me to share important details with the goal of providing an accurate historical record of events. Indeed, certain individuals may have an alternate motivation: to ascribe blame to someone other than themselves, which is why I cast such a broad net in reporting the details in this book.
My mentor and producer Mitch Koss has always pushed me to report the facts on the ground before anything else—and they form the basis of this story: where I was, what I experienced, who I met, and how I came to believe that separated defines not just the Trump administration’s act of seizing children and breaking apart families. For Juan, José, and thousands more just like them, the word describes a deep understanding of physical and mental pain—an unspeakable horror they were made to endure. For many others, including, for a time, myself, it describes the opposite: an inability to comprehend how Donald Trump’s self-inflicted American tragedy was able to happen. The existence of both of those realities is only reconciled by facing the truth about our country—and ourselves.