On March 8, 2019, President Trump, stopping to survey tornado damage in Alabama, told the assembled press corps he couldn’t get there “fast enough,” about the twister that killed twenty-three in Lee County nearly a week earlier.
“I wanted to come the day it happened,” he added about his trip, which he made en route to a previously-scheduled weekend getaway at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida.
But while Trump, sporting a dark windbreaker bearing the presidential seal, got a birds-eye view of the damage from Marine One, he had something else on the mind: family separations.
After he ended the administration’s practice of systematically ripping apart migrant families in June 2018, the number of those taken into custody crossing the southern border in July dipped slightly—from 43,180 to 40,149—causing some to argue the policy had worked. Toward the end of the year, the number rose back to the levels seen at the end of the Obama administration, and the president was having second thoughts about his decision. By February 2019, the monthly total had skyrocketed to 76,575—a figure not seen since George W. Bush was president, and a sign President Trump’s border policies were failing.
“This is something the president gets very emotional about,” one former senior administration official told me about his obsession over immigration statistics.
Trump’s aerial tour of the natural disaster began at Fort Benning, Georgia, where Air Force One had landed at 10:43 A.M. local time. After deplaning behind him, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, dressed in a long black coat, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, wearing high heels, hustled past a phalanx of aides and ahead of the president and First Lady Melania Trump to board Marine One. They were part of his official entourage touring the devastation.
With all on board, the presidential helicopter took off moments later for a seventeen-minute flight to Auburn University Regional Airport across the state line. Outside their rectangular windows were scenes of flattened trees, destroyed buildings, and wrecked cars. Distracted, the president brought up family separations.
“Kirstjen, we’re going to have to reinstitute that,” Trump declared while tornado victims awaited him “with open arms and raised cell phones” on the ground, as NBC affiliate KPLC reported.
“Sir,” Nielsen began, “I’m not sure I can reinstitute this on my own,” she said, attempting to end the conversation.
It wasn’t the first occasion the president had brought up restarting family separations since he was forced to end them—and it wouldn’t be the last. But this time, the conversation was put to bed not by the president, nor either cabinet secretary on board his chopper.
“We can’t do that. We can’t do that,” Melania Trump cut in, curtailing any debate.
It wasn’t the first time the first lady voiced her opposition to family separations. In June 2018, at the height of the outrage over the policy, her spokeswoman said “Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families” and that “she believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.”
Trump, frustrated, rolled his eyes at the interjection by the sneaker-and-peacoat-clad First Lady, but did not argue back. Instead, the president sighed.
“We’ll see. We’ll see,” he said.
The following morning, the border numbers were still on President Trump’s mind. From Mar-a-Lago, he turned to Twitter.
“Border Patrol and Law Enforcement has apprehended (captured) large numbers of illegal immigrants at the Border,” Trump wrote. “They won’t be coming into the U.S. The Wall is being built and will greatly help us in the future, and now!”
Exactly one month later, Trump fired Nielsen. After my colleagues Julia Ainsley and Geoff Bennett reported their falling out was due in part to Nielsen’s reluctance to restart family separations, something Trump had “for months urged his administration to reinstate,” Trump responded.
“We’re not looking to do that, no,” he said at the White House. Trump then qualified his statement. “When you don’t do it, it brings a lot more people to the border.”
THE NIGHT JUAN arrived in Washington, D.C., to be reunified with José, Katie Waldman, Nielsen’s spokeswoman at the Department of Homeland Security who relentlessly defended family separations, enjoyed her birthday dinner at the Trump International Hotel at a table for two. It was October 3, 2018.
Twenty days later, she was on the border again, still mugging for Instagram, this time in Arizona behind a plaque that indicated the boundary between the United States and Mexico. Behind her appeared to be the same corrals that Juan and José passed through and over before they found themselves in the United States.
“The border wall is on the American side,” her caption read, a huge smile on her face at the place where Juan’s and José’s lives changed forever.
Later that year, after Katy Tur and I started filming American Swamp, our MSNBC documentary series about corruption in Washington, we met Waldman for dinner in D.C. On an unseasonably warm December night, we sat outside under space heaters.
Katy, who was five months pregnant, asked her about defending zero tolerance on behalf of the Trump administration.
“My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think about the separations differently. But I don’t think so.”
It was a line Katie had said to me before—prior to visiting the detention facilities.
“DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself—to try to make me more compassionate—but it didn’t work.”
“It didn’t work? I will never forget what I saw. Seriously. Are you a white nationalist?” I asked, exasperated.
“No, but I believe if you come to America you should assimilate. Why do we need to have ‘Little Havana’?”
Waldman, a native of Fort Lauderdale, grew up living side by side with Cuban Americans in South Florida, a group of people whose lives couldn’t be more intertwined with the culture and politics of the region.
Neither Katy nor I knew what to say.
Katy, flabbergasted, got up and went to the restroom. When she left, Waldman leaned in, and in a hushed tone asked me a question.
“You know who I’m dating, right?”
“We all know,” I told her, about one of the biggest open secrets in D.C.
When Katy returned to the table, I laughed, telling her in front of Waldman that she wanted us to know who she was dating.
“Jacob told me before you got here,” Katy deadpanned.
Today, Waldman and her then-boyfriend, Stephen Miller, the architect of the family separation policy and the senior advisor to President Trump, are married.
After leaving DHS, Waldman worked briefly for Arizona senator Martha McSally, and she is now the press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence.
Katy and I ran into Waldman a year later, at a Trump election rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, as we were shooting another episode of American Swamp. Vice President Pence was there to introduce the president on the same day articles of impeachment were introduced against Trump in the House of Representatives. We congratulated her on her engagement and new job, and asked how things were going.
She was elated and told us she was going to meet up backstage with Miller for thirty minutes, the most time they would see each other all week.
Before the rally started, I asked her about a report from the DHS inspector general that had come out just more than two weeks earlier, which confirmed that “DHS did not have the information technology system functionality needed to track separated migrant families during the execution of the Zero Tolerance Policy,” a surprise to no one.
There was a shocking revelation in the report, however. CBP, which officially separated 2,814 during zero tolerance, then later admitted it separated 1,556 more before the policy officially started, told the Office of Management and Budget: “it [had planned to] separate more than 26,000 children between May and September 2018.” If the policy had not been stopped, this would have been a massive increase in the total number of separations and with the report, our understanding of the scale of the tragedy widened. Since the supposed end of family separations, the ACLU alleged, there have been more than one thousand separations, and the practice is still ongoing.
I asked Waldman, as we stood there behind the press riser that President Trump would later point to and ridicule, if she knew about the fact the government was planning to separate five times more children than it had ultimately been able to before the president backed down.
“We had to prepare for all contingencies,” she deadpanned.
And with that, she went backstage to see her fiancé.
THE NIGHT AFTER Christmas 2019, I sat down with Juan and José for dinner near their home, the third time I had seen them since I started writing this book. They always asked for updates on my progress (and the first copy). I told them about my attempts to determine and visit exactly where they crossed as I visited the border between San Luis Río Colorado, Mexico, and San Luis, Arizona.
I had spent an entire day driving up and down along the Arizona border looking for what Juan had described to me earlier: white horse corrals and a short border fence. I told the Border Patrol I was going to be there, and they attempted to point me in the right direction. I believe I eventually found the exact area.
Juan and José recounted what it was like to jump over the wall and within a minute have the Border Patrol waiting for them and the rest of the families they crossed with. The vast majority of our conversations were now in English, José’s improving particularly fast as he went to school and spent extracurricular time learning the vocational skills of an electrician. Juan showed me the Social Security card and work permit he had received just that day, and we high-fived. We video chatted with María, his wife, and his now three daughters, his wife bottle-feeding the youngest, whom Juan and José had never met.
They freely laughed together. Everything felt loose, and for the first time I was able to ask them both candid questions about the moment of separation itself. José, who had been reluctant to say anything in our previous conversations, described it almost exactly. Turning away from his son, who was sitting next to him in the booth, both of them across from me about the same distance Juan and I sat across from each other inside the Adelanto migrant prison, Juan started to sob. He hung his head in shame, recalling the particulars of the day they were separated without warning or a chance to say good-bye. José kept a straight face, his fifteen-year-old frame now much bigger than the pictures I had seen of the scrawny kid in his dad’s store.
“HARMING CHILDREN MEANS a century of suffering,” a government official who was involved in the runification effort told me the following morning at a Starbucks outside of Washington, D.C.
“It’s the greatest human rights catastrophe of my lifetime,” the official explained, referring to domestic U.S. history, while rocking back and forth.
While there was plenty of blame to go around, the official told me without flinching that former colleague Scott Lloyd is “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history.” The official believed Lloyd—head of the agency supposedly responsible for the welfare of migrant children placed in its custody—had abdicated his legal parental authority and custodianship of more than five thousand children. Lloyd was “starry-eyed around Stephen Miller,” yet was blind to warnings coming from his own staff.
Lloyd, in a written response, told me he was taken aback by the accusation of child abuse.
“There is nothing anyone can point to that would make that statement true. My job was to take care of the kids and unite them with a sponsor. It’s something we did well, and I am proud of the work we did. This person, whoever it is, had the opportunity to air their concerns in person while these events were happening, but instead is choosing to speak anonymously, through the media, two years after the fact. It is a comment that clearly belies everything I have ever done in my professional and personal life. Given all of this, it’s impossible for me to take it seriously.”
Lloyd was transferred out of ORR into an HHS office overseeing faith-based initiatives in November 2018, after the end of zero tolerance. In February 2019, he was called before the newly-sworn-in Democratic Congress to answer questions about his time at the helm of ORR.
Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Lloyd was asked by Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee about whether he had ordered the destruction of the list tracking separated children, first reported by Politico’s Dan Diamond in October 2018.
“It had been reported in the press,” Lee began, “that during an internal HHS review of the family separation policy, a top HHS official found that you instructed your staff to stop keeping a spreadsheet tracking separated families. Did you make this decision and if so why? Why in the world would you choose to make a decision like this? As a father yourself can you explain to us how this possibly could have happened?”
Lloyd, dressed in a red tie and now sporting a full beard—more mountain man than choir boy—sat with his fingers interlaced on top of the witness table and began to respond.
“Thank you, Congresswoman. That was an incorrect reporting. Um, I did not make that, uh,” Lloyd paused and looked down. He searched for his next word, having been sworn in under oath.
“Order,” he said.
Before he could continue, Lee moved on, asking Lloyd about proposed shelters in her district.
Lloyd was asked again about the incident, by Diamond in October 2019 after he had left the Trump administration entirely.
“There was a list,” Lloyd explained to Diamond. “I knew of the list,” he said, contracting what he told his staff. “The list ended up leaking to the media so, really, my direction was about how we communicate about the kids on the list.”
Meanwhile, at the Starbucks, for nearly two hours the government official and I discussed the intimate details of the separation policy’s development, implementation, and aftermath, the official alternating between anger, remorse, and determination as we ticked through two years of dates and events while I attempted to better understand what I, in the summer of 2018, had seen: hundreds of children, locked up in cages after being taken from their parents, then moved alone, often for months, to shelters.
Though most of the separated children had been reunited with their parents by then, a year and a half after a federal judge ordered the government to put all of the families back together, there were still moms and dads who had been deported without their kids. They had still not been reunited. Additionally, one final child was still in the custody of the federal government.
THE SAME DAY, after a thirty-minute drive that took me across two rivers, I slid into a booth with a former Department of Homeland Security official who wanted to unburden himself.
“We should have done better to explain what was happening,” he said about DHS’s response to the public outrage over the crisis. Meanwhile, the White House was putting “impossible pressure” on the agency. Despite that, this person, directly involved not just in the reunifications but the separations themselves, wanted me to know that he regretted being a part of the policy.
“This was the greatest mistake from a law enforcement and human perspective in my career. If I could go back and change it I would. It was wrong.” As he spoke, he polished off a bowl of grains topped with salmon.
He had come to this opinion even though he believed data showed “it was working.” By this, he meant the separation policy was “deterring families” from coming into the country. That’s exactly what President Trump wanted all along, and why he had pressured Kirstjen Nielsen to restart the practice.
It was hard to argue that the shocking cruelty of the Trump administration’s separation policy wasn’t integral to achieving their objectives.
THE FOLLOWING MONTH, in early January 2020, both Katie Waldman and her former boss, Jonathan Hoffman, now a spokesperson at the Department of Defense, were in the news. They were issuing statements that Iran fired ballistic missiles at a military base in Iraq in response to President Trump’s ordered assassination General Qassim Sulemani. The people who were in charge of the most spectacular policy fail of the Trump administration were now in charge of communicating whether or not the nation was about to go to war.
As 2020 continued, Waldman added to her portfolio the government’s public relations response to the global pandemic known as COVID-19. She again would find herself working with some of the same public health professionals at the Department of Health and Human Services she repeatedly clashed with during family separations and the court-ordered effort to reunify them.
Waldman’s and Hoffman’s departures from DHS hadn’t moderated the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Since zero tolerance, nothing had captured the attention of the nation like that June 2018 did. But the deterrence-based immigration policy championed by the Trump administration since that first meeting on Valentine’s Day 2017, and to differing degrees by previous presidential administrations before it, has continued to be deployed at a rapid clip. Some activists argue that what is happening today is as bad if not worse than family separations.
Migrants who make it here and prove a credible fear, like Juan and José did, are now made to wait in Mexico, and tens of thousands of them are doing just that, in some of the most violent cities in one of the most violent countries in the world. Reports of rapes, murders, kidnappings, and families self-separating in order to have the best chance at survival are commonplace. They are the “lucky” ones. Other migrants are being deported immediately to seek asylum in Central America under agreements that place them directly back into harm’s way, if not the specific harm they fled. COVID-19 threw the entire immigration system into further chaos, President Trump using it as justification for, amongst other things, his border wall and immediately expelling virtually all asylum seekers, including children. COVID allowed Trump to quickly enact “what DHS was trying to do for three years,” a government official quipped to me.
As I write this, I’m watching with the rest of the world as the Trump administration bungles its response to COVID-19. Many of the officials showing up at the once-again daily White House press briefings were names and faces heretofore unfamiliar to most of the American public. Not to me.
Chad Wolf. Alexander Azar. Dr. Robert Kadlec. Katie Waldman. All of them are central figures in the Trump administration’s widely criticized response to the ongoing global pandemic. But before that, they were central figures in the Trump administration’s family separation policy. Names you’ve now read and learned about here. Waldman, now Katie Miller, herself tested positive for COVID-19 in May 2020, raising concerns about a potential White House outbreak and sending top officials into self-isolation.
WHILE REPORTING THIS book, and after the height of the family separation policy, I traveled twice to Guatemala to see conditions on the ground there myself. We visited villages where many had picked up and left because of extreme poverty, food insecurity, and violence. Before my trips, I learned from a former government official that the Trump administration had pulled foreign aid to Guatemala despite the fact they knew the aid would slow migration, the Trump administration’s goal.
Back in D.C., over breakfast, I told this person and another immigration official about Juan and José, who were from Petén, Guatemala.
They looked at each other and laughed. I was confused.
“What’s so funny about Petén?” I asked.
“Nothing, nothing,” they both said.
I mentioned that I knew about the narco violence there, the secret airports used by smugglers, and the violence that Juan and José faced before leaving to come here. Before we left the restaurant, I pressed them again about their reaction to my invoking Petén, and they said nothing.
Days later, I saw an article in the Washington Post, and it all made sense.
“Asylum seekers rejected by the United States could be transported to a remote airport in the lowland jungles of Guatemala as part of the Central American nation’s new migration accord with the Trump administration, according to senior officials from both countries,” the Post’s Nick Miroff and Kevin Sieff reported. “The plan would have U.S. immigration authorities deliver migrants to Petén’s Mundo Maya airport, which is used primarily by tourists visiting the Maya ruins at Tikal.”
I texted one of the two officials at breakfast that day.
“No wonder you guys laughed about Petén.”
I didn’t get a response. Maybe I should have been more explicit about how foul I thought their reaction was—laughing after learning that a separated father and son I was getting to know could be sent back to where they fled death threats.
REPORTING ON FAMILY separations was never the plan, but as the realities on the ground became shockingly clear, my colleagues and I found ourselves consumed by the story. After the media furor died down, we continued our focus on the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Julia Ainsley and I kept working closely together, breaking several stories that exposed the hypocrisy and brutality of the administration’s policies.
After family separation, at least seven migrant children died in the custody of Customs and Border Protection. No child had perished in the previous ten years. A sadly predictable outcome to a punitive Border Patrol enforcement strategy based around “consequence delivery,” or “prevention through deterrence.” It was an outcome that an activist with No More Deaths, a humanitarian group that leaves water bottles for migrants in the Arizona desert, told me had happened before and would happen again so long as the border was militarized.
Later in the year—as family separation ended and cartels exploited the perceived weakness of President Trump, who had backed down from the policy—a record number of families and unaccompanied children entered the United States, overflowing Border Patrol stations. Reports emerged of horrid conditions including children locked up for days, as José was, far beyond the seventy-two-hour limit.
Julia and I broke a story about the badly overcrowded Yuma, Arizona, Border Patrol station—the same one Juan and José were separated in. We were leaked more than thirty reports of alleged abuse of minors in custody there—including a sexual assault and retribution for protesting conditions. To this day, Customs and Border Protection has not released the result of the investigations it opened into those allegations based on our reporting.
When I went to Yuma to look into where Juan and José had crossed, I also asked the Border Patrol for an official interview with the sector chief, who had promised to investigate the claims we had revealed in our reporting. At first, it looked promising. The local public information officer told me that he was going to run it up the flagpole to headquarters in Washington, and he would let me know a time to come back.
I checked in after having not heard anything.
Good morning Mr. Soboroff,
We will not be able to accommodate your request for any engagements until further notice. We appreciate you reaching out. Thank you.
At least on this trip, as I worked to excavate details from the separation of Juan and José and follow up about abuse in the Border Patrol station in which they were held, I wasn’t so welcome in Yuma after all.
But in January 2020, when Kevin McAleenan, who had succeeded Kirstjen Nielsen as acting homeland security secretary, was himself succeeded as acting secretary by Chad Wolf, who had authored an early version of the justification for family separations, I would finally be invited to officially visit Yuma. The trip, however, would be to watch Wolf discuss how President Trump was, finally, building stretches of his “big, beautiful border wall.” I didn’t go.
Following Wolf’s visit to Yuma, the Border Patrol named a new chief, Rodney Scott, the same Rodney Scott who had penned me a letter accusing me and our network of covering family separations as a “made-for-TV drama.” Today he is the man in charge of the nation’s border force and its thousands of agents who were tasked with the unprecedented mission of separating thousands of migrant families, the same agents now responsible for a suffering so profound it will last a lifetime.
A MONTH AFTER Scott’s appointment as Border Patrol chief, Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit group that shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to ban land mines, issued a scathing report about the Trump administration’s family separation policy. In it, the group declares the “government’s forcible separation of asylum-seeking families constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment and, in all cases PHR evaluated, meets criteria for torture.”
Torture.
Despite the warnings, the evidence, the journalism, and the public outcry, “torture” was not a word I had used to describe what I had seen with my own eyes. But that’s exactly what it was.
“U.S. officials,” the group wrote, “intentionally carried out discriminatory actions that caused severe pain and suffering, in order to punish, coerce, and intimidate Central American asylum seekers to give up their asylum claims.”
By their measure, the Trump administration succeeded in one respect—the act of separations and the damage it caused to thousands of parents and children. But where they failed, and will continue to fail, was to quash the determination, perseverance, and love that those they tortured share. Look no further than Juan and José, who, on the contrary, didn’t give up their asylum claims once they were separated and reunited. They only fought harder.
Their claims are now being adjudicated separately by the United States government. Once they’re able to clear the massive backlog of cases and if President Trump’s new policies don’t stop them again, Juan and José hope to achieve their dream of becoming legal permanent residents, and then citizens, of the United States. If and when that happens—likely no sooner than within the next three years because of the massive case backlog—the father and son dream of having their family join them here. They dream of holding the newest, youngest member of their family—a baby girl—for the first time.
Here, in the country that represented safety and opportunity, only to give way to immeasurable pain and unexpected suffering. Now, once again, at the dawn of a new beginning, the United States is home to what they had hoped it would be when they approached the international boundary in Arizona: the possibility of a better future, and life together, for them all.