The film Separated, directed by Errol Morris, has an interesting storyline. Its about the dastardly practice of separating families at the Mexico US border through the eyes of a Mexican American family. Morris’s secondary characters move to the center with their back stories and their analysis. This is Morris’s trademark style. His examination of the cruel separation policy in this film adds much to his other film pages of history. The entire drama emerges only when the action and collage are consummated.
A lot of the movie has to do with the correction of disinformation and obfuscation carried out by the first Trump administration in the presentation of the policy to the media and the public. One of them is the insistence that the policy was not new; that in effect all it sought to achieve was a leveled approach that other presidential administrations had done involving the unaccompanied children program, which is under the Office of Refugee Resettlement if it is even such a program. And that it is more or less the same with what happens to a US citizen with children once he or she is convicted of a crime and imprisoned.
But, as his critics point out, the unaccompanied children program had been designed precisely to assist children who crossed the border without being accompanied by any adult or children whose parents had outstanding warrants and were arrested by US authorities. It never envisaged a scenario in which each time a family traversed the border, a systematic separation of that family occurred giving what is referred to here as state manufactured orphans. That got changed by the Trump administration among others as part of what the administration termed “zero tolerance” policy.
The goal was to intimidate anybody considering traveling to the USA in an unauthorized manner (although in the past there have always been rules and due process to handle such situations).
The shift, according to Jonathan White, previously Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Office of Refugee Resettlement stated that “There will be a purpose for child’s injury; this is going to scare the families from approaching them.” Elaine Duke, the former acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, reports that the ORR “ran out of ‘pots for babies’ quite quickly” and estimates roughly a tenfold increase in the number of children thrown into the system, often housed within bare facilities, away from their parents. “In many cases this was a dire cause for concern as they were bound to part ways with their children for good,” Duke explains.
First, White dismisses the idea that what took place to parents and children at the border during Trump’s era was the same as a mother or father being taken into custody for some offense in any city in America. “This in turn allows her to be somewhat comforted in knowing where her child is,” White asserts, “but they have an open understanding that their child is located somewhere.” He claims the violation of US borders that is often dealt with within days in Trump’s reign there was a strategy to expedite the fact of children being put into overboard camps before parental acclimatization even reached 10its3419087 peak. In simple words where he says parents would undergo this normalization only to find absolute bewilderment in where their children had gone.
One of the main features of Morris’s mode here is that it recalls some of the classic works within documentaries he produced in the early years of the century, such as “The Fog of War” and “Dr. Death”, in that it largely resorts to augmenting techniques including zoetrope drawings of crawling people through fence abstractions and some restagings. The latter are shot like an action-adventure movie and are the only stylistically discordant or distracting note; the verbal descriptions of the events as narrated by the parents of the children and the government officials carted all sorts of emotions that were so powerful, and so from which the poor dramatizations really would amount to a covering of more than a hat.
But in any context of things that Morris has done here, this is quite a slight point. One depressing, although admittedly minor, irony is that those who might benefit most from watching “Separated” would not wish to do so since they have accepted the rationale of the much weighted official story.
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