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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on tomorrow's show, Book Week continues. Novelist Samantha Harvey joins us. She just won the Booker Prize for her novel Orbital. It's a meditative look at Earth and humanity through the lives of six astronauts living on the International Space Station. Plus, New York Magazine editor Choire Sicha will be here to talk about their list of the 39 reasons to love New York. We want to know yours. Get ready to call in and tell us. That is in the future. Now, let's get this hour started with a new documentary called Separated.

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Alison Stewart: The election is over and the country is preparing for Donald Trump's second administration and that means a focus on immigration. A new hybrid documentary dramatization will remind citizens of what happened the first time. It's called Separated. The film explores the Trump administration's so-called "zero tolerance program," separating immigrant children from their parents as a deterrent policy.

The documentary takes us behind the scenes using emails within the Trump administration. There are first-person testimonials from those who worked with these families, plus those who worked for the Trump administration. Separated will have its TV debut on MSNBC this Saturday at 9:00 PM Eastern. Joining me now to talk about the documentary, please welcome its director, Errol Morris. Hi, Errol.

Errol Morris: Hi there.

Alison Stewart: Executive producer Jacob Soboroff, who covered the story for NBC while it was happening and wrote a book about it called Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. Hi, Jacob.

Jacob Soboroff: Hey, Alison, thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: Errol, your work often centers on communicating policies, policymakers, and the human consequences of these policies as you've put out films like Thin Blue Line and Fog of War. Now, Separated. What techniques have you found to be the most impactful in getting things across and getting all of that policy across?

Errol Morris: I don't think there's any one technique. This film uses a whole number of techniques. It uses drama. It uses a lot of memos and communications between various officials in the Trump administration. It uses interviews. It uses all of those techniques that are available to me as a filmmaker. There isn't one way to tell a story. I guess the important way is to tell the story and to communicate it to others.

Alison Stewart: Jacob, how would you describe the difference between your roles as a boots-on-the-ground journalist covering the story versus your role as an executive producer on this documentary?

Jacob Soboroff: Collaborating with the great Errol Morris has been the greatest professional experience of my lifetime. Because when I covered this story in the summer of 2018 for NBC News, I didn't understand how the US government could do something so deliberately cruel. I say that objectively as a reporter. The information you will see in this film bears that out. They knew exactly what they were doing.

That's why I wrote the book, to answer some of the questions that I still had. When Errol Morris read the book and the two of us connected on making the film, I never could have understood how opening my notebook to Errol and Errol's team could result in something that has moved the conversation so far beyond what I could have ever done. Errol Morris tells this story in the way that only Errol Morris can. You mentioned some of his other films. To me, this is in line with all of them.

The way he talks to Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, even Steve Bannon in one of his most recent films, he looks into people's souls through the Interrotron, his signature device, in a way that I could never do over the phone talking to sources or in the field with a stick microphone. I think that not only is this documented a chapter in our history that was one of the most shameful, according to the Republican-appointed judge who stopped it, but it's also a warning about what yet is to come.

Alison Stewart: Errol, in the film Separated, some of the story is told through these emails between administration officials. First of all, how did you get the emails?

Errol Morris: They're publicly available, but I got them through Jacob Soboroff.

Alison Stewart: Jacob, tell us a little bit about retaining these emails.

Jacob Soboroff: Well, as Errol mentioned, through inspectors general and the US government and investigations they conducted, through Freedom of Information Act, requests through sources who have handed over some documents as I reported on this story. Other reporters, frankly, have reported on this story like Caitlin Dickerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize at The Atlantic for her cover story on family separation. The breadth and depth of the planning and implementation of this policy have become very clear.

Those emails, I think, tell, as Earl said, one part of this story. What Errol has done is taken the emails that both I and others have handed over to him and combine them with a film really. When I say "a film," I mean a movie. This is not a "documentary." There is a narrative film within a film. There are emails upon a screen. There are the these interviews with officials that nobody has ever heard from before that all complement each other in this way that is so unique to Errol.

Alison Stewart: Jacob, part of the idea of the deterrence for families was they had to be aware that if they decided to make this journey, if they decided to make it to the US, they could experience traumatic treatment. You were reporting on it, which means the administration actually needed you to report on this in order to get the word out to the families who are considering this. How do you square the fact that the people responsible for this policy needed you to do your job?

Jacob Soboroff: Yes, Errol asked at one certain point in the film, was I a tool? I answered, "Bigly," as Donald Trump might say. I think with hindsight, I can look back and see that, but what I don't think the Trump administration anticipated was the level of public outrage based on not simply my reporting, certainly, but the dozens of reporters. There were 10 of us in each of those facilities down in June of 2018 that went through them. It was not a bipartisan outrage. It was a universal outrage that stemmed from whether it was folly or wise on their behalf to let us in.

What the US government, what the Trump administration allowed us to do, which was to see this with our own eyes, albeit without video cameras, just with a pad and paper. It resulted in the one significant, massive policy reversal of the first Trump term. He signed an executive order ending the policy that his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, signed into place as she stood over his shoulder, reversing the policy that they had wanted in the first place.

Alison Stewart: We see you sit down at one point with Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen. You talked about the border policy. How do you think about the relationship, what you observed, and we see your notes, we see you going through your notes, and the way that they talked about it in DC?

Jacob Soboroff: Well, nothing as they talk about in DC is ever really how anybody experience. I'm a campaign reporter when I'm not an immigration reporter. There's such a chasm between how we all see our lives, people across the country see our lives, and how politicians in Washington, DC, talk about it. I got into covering this topic because the Trump administration, Kirstjen Nielsen, other officials were talking about the border as a war zone. That's a direct quote. Indeed, it is not. All it takes is using your own eyes and looking at the facts on the ground to really understand that.

This wasn't a prime example of what you were hearing coming out of Washington. That press conference that Kirstjen Nielsen gives that you see Errol highlight in the film, it was misdirection, lie, untruth, one after the other. What it takes is people to pay attention. My fear that I have developed in the wake of covering this reporting and certainly throughout the Biden administration is that people have wanted to know less. It was people wanting to know more about what was happening to immigrants in this country that was able to push back on the lies that were being told by the Trump administration at that time.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new documentary, Separated, which will air on MSNBC this Saturday night at 9:00 PM. Director Errol Morris is here to talk about it, along with NBC journalist Jacob Soboroff, whose book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, inspired the film, which he also executive produced. Errol, you show us this press conference with Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen. She rejects the idea that the policy of family separations was about deterrence. We actually have a clip of that press conference. Let's take a listen.

Reporter: Are you intending for this to play out as it is playing out? Are you intending for parents to be separated from their children? Are you intending to send a message?

Kirstjen Nielsen: I find that offensive. No, because why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that?

Reporter: Perhaps as a deterrent.

Kirstjen Nielsen: No.

Reporter: AG Sessions says it was a deterrent.

Kirstjen Nielsen: The way that it works--

Reporter: The Attorney General said it was a deterrent.

Kirstjen Nielsen: That's not the question that you asked me. It's a law passed by the United States Congress. Rather than fixing the law, Congress is asking those of us who enforce the law to turn our backs on the law and not enforce the law. It's not an answer.

Alison Stewart: Errol, why didn't the administration want to admit that?

Errol Morris: Well, this is not the administration per se. This is Kirstjen Nielsen. Trying to understand what's going on in her mind is a difficult enterprise. I see it as a form not just of lying but of self-deception.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Errol Morris: I'm always interested. In any interview, is this person obtuse or are they just playing an obtuse person? I can't really even answer that in her case. It was a fallback position. We're just following the law. We're not doing really anything more than that. Well, of course, there are moral implications to what she was doing, which somehow she just wants to avoid talking about. Whether this is conscious, unconscious, you tell me.

Alison Stewart: Well, let's talk about Scott Lloyd, who at the time was director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. I believe he's the only Trump administration official in the film who spoke to you directly and answered your questions. Let's listen to it a little bit right after you ask him about something you refer to as "lose the list." Would you set this up for us a bit, Errol?

Errol Morris: Well, here, you have these family separations. Here, you have these children, state-created orphans that are in Scott Lloyd's care. Now, you would expect, at least I would expect that if you're separating families, you would keep records. Who are these people's parents? Where are they? How could they possibly be reunited in the future? There was an active attempt, this is what I find most appalling, to prevent any kind of records from being kept. Scott Lloyd was rumored to have said, "Can't you just lose the list?" because the list was creating trouble for him. No, you can't just lose the list. You can lose it. As a result, we still haven't been able to reunite many, many, many separated families. To me, that is really, truly horrible.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to this clip from Separated, where you talk about losing the list. Let's roll that.

Errol Morris: This whole story about "lose the list," is this apocryphal?

Scott Lloyd: I just had a meeting where I asked, "Why do we have it?" It was explained to me and I said, "Okay. Well, the list doesn't bother me. The fact that it leaked bothered me." Now, it's become a news story, so I just wanted to understand it. Here's the other problem and I don't have a really solid recollection of exactly what happened. I had a lot of meetings that looked like this. Honestly, I would like to have the benefit of just sitting in the room with the people who were there and say, "Well, what do you remember?" All I can do is speak to my best recollection of it.

Alison Stewart: Errol, what was your takeaway from Scott Lloyd's interview?

Errol Morris: If I suggested that there's some uncertainty with many interview subjects of whether they are playing as obtuse or really are obtuse. In Scott Lloyd's case, he seems utterly clueless. He objects to not the list itself, or so he claims, but the fact that it was released or the fact of its non-existence was released to the public. It's all really, really, really depressing. People seem oblivious to their own policies. People seem oblivious to the morality or immorality of what they're doing.

If you like, and it was one of the kinder things that anybody has said about this movie, it's an example of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. It is a story about bureaucracy. It's a story about bureaucrats who did their job and acted heroically like Jonathan White and Jallyn Sualog and people who were just simply following orders and convinced themselves of their own rectitude despite all evidence to the contrary.

Alison Stewart: Jacob, I want to go back to "lose the list." Can you paint a picture for us of how the experiences of these families were impacted by the maintenance of those tracking the documents?

Jacob Soboroff: I think that they're responsible for these prolonged separations almost entirely. In the book, I report that there was a woman by the name of Claire Trickler-McNulty, who worked for ICE at the time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and warned us that family separation policy was being developed that if they did this, the back-end technological systems were not set up to deliberately render accompanied children unaccompanied, to torture them, in the words of Physicians for Human Rights, which won a Nobel Peace Prize, to abuse them.

Government-sanctioned child abuse is what Colleen Kraft said at the time, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The deliberately cruel nature of this and the haphazardly implemented policy, which is certainly a generous description, is directly responsible for what Errol said earlier, which is not only the prolonged separation of many of the 5,500 children from their parents for months and months before they were reunited, but the number today of 1,360, which is the number of children as we're speaking to each other right now, according to the last status report from the Department of Homeland Security, without confirmed reunifications today, six plus years after this policy had been started.

Alison Stewart: Errol, a good portion of the visuals that we see are actual dramatizations of a mother and her son's journey across the border and through the US immigration systems. They're really cinematic. Why did you decide that that part of the story had to be told through fictionalization?

Errol Morris: Jacob has answered this quite eloquently, perhaps even better than I can.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Errol Morris: He points out that there is no record of separations visually. No one invited camera crews to watch families being formally separated at the border. We have that one audio recording of children screaming and crying out, but there's a paucity of any kind of information. I felt that it was important in telling the story. One element, not every element, but one element, was to show the plight of a family going through this entire process. I learned a lot doing it.

To me, the most powerful sequence in my movie shows a scene between a separated family, a mother and her son, where the son feels deeply betrayed by the mother. "Why did you do this to me?" but she didn't do it to him. This was done to him by the US government. There's something deeply tragic and horrifying about the thought. I know as a parent, to me, what's the most important thing that I could possibly do? That's protect my child. To see a situation where a parent is prevented, prevented from protecting her child, forcibly separated from her child, and her child holding it against her as if it was her decision and not the decision of some governmental force.

Alison Stewart: Jacob, can I dive in here? I'm curious. Were you concerned at all that any Trump supporters would look at the cinematic parts of this film and be like, "That's not true. They made that up. That's not true"?

Jacob Soboroff: No, no. Go ahead, Errol. Sorry.

Errol Morris: The children were separated that that's not true?

Alison Stewart: I'm just saying if I were a Trump supporter watching the fictional aspects, they would likely say, "Oh, it's not true. That's fictional." What would you say?

Jacob Soboroff: What I would say is what Errol Morris has done here is what Errol Morris has done throughout his prestigious career as one of the great filmmakers of all time, which is employ narrative filmmaking in the context of documentary filmmaking to tell a story in a way that only he can. Just to emphasize what Errol said, my response is you can say whatever you want. I saw this with my own eyes, but I didn't see it with my video camera, my security blanket as a television correspondent because the government didn't allow us to. What Errol Morris has done here is breathe an emotional truth into this motion picture that doesn't otherwise exist.

There were no film. They literally do not exist. There was no camera inside other than the government propaganda photos that were handed out after the two visits I went on with other journalists of families being separated or held inside the cages that I saw with my own eyes. Kids laying on those concrete floors under the Mylar blankets, supervised by security contractors in a watchtower after having been deliberately ripped apart. They didn't even let us see the children actually being separated. They just showed us them in person after it had happened.

What Errol and Eugenio Caballero, the Oscar-winning production designer of Pan's Labyrinth and Roma, amongst so many other projects, Gabriela Cartol, the actress who plays the mother in this film, and everyone involved in this production within a production have done is do something that I hope one day every one of the 5,500 children who were taken from their parents has the opportunity to do, which is tell their own story in their own way and in their own time, almost like the Shoah Foundation has done for survivors of the Holocaust. That's not something that, number one, Errol nor I can force and should.

Number two, if there was a family in this project, they would be a target of the Trump administration, incoming Trump administration, potentially at this very minute. It's important for everyone to understand that none of the separated families who have been reunited have permanent legal status in the United States. They're here on a rolling 36-month parole basis. Any one of them can be deported at any moment under the incoming administration. I'm so proud of what Errol has done because it has not only protected the families, but it also breathes life into stories that haven't been able to be told because the government prevented us from doing so.

Alison Stewart: Jacob, how are you preparing as a journalist to cover the second Trump administration?

Jacob Soboroff: To do what we have always done, which is go out there and look at the facts on the ground. I didn't know what I would see when I walked into those facilities. What I do know is by walking out and telling the world through the platforms of NBC News, what I did see inside them was a small part of a larger effort of people in our line of work through documenting the realities of life inside and outside of these detention centers for people that go through a decades-long, bipartisan deterrence-based, punitive-based immigration policy, what they are subjected to. I think that you have to continue to do that in the face of whatever the threats may be.

Alison Stewart: The Trump administration has a new target, trans teens. Are you worried that people will forget about immigration, Jacob?

Jacob Soboroff: I've been worried that people want to know less about immigration since the second that I walked out of those facilities. We had some kind of an X-ray vision that developed amongst the American population, actually, the global population, that resulted in Trump reversing course on this policy. We all saw the immigration system for what it was in that summer of 2018. It dehumanized people. I'm sorry to say that in the face of what they are promising, I reported from the floor of the conventions.

I saw those "mass deportation now" signs being held up by thousands of people inside that sports arena. In the face of what they're promising, mass deportation is family separation by another name. I saw the reaction of the American public and the global public and the Pope and you name it, the first time around. No matter what the polls say about how people feel about mass deportation or immigrants today or no matter the target of the Trump administration, this is the number one promised priority of this incoming administration. I know how the public reacted before and how I suspect they will react again.

Alison Stewart: The new document-- Oh yes, go ahead.

Errol Morris: The Trump administration is found that being mean to immigrants sells. We've listened repeatedly to claims that immigrants are basically criminals. They're villains, rapists, child abusers, drug addicts, members of one criminal cartel or another. Do we ever hear them talking about immigrants as part of what makes up our country, a country of immigrants, a country of people from diverse backgrounds and cultures? No, we don't. That, to me, worries me more than anything.

Alison Stewart: The documentary, Separated, will air on MSNBC this Saturday at 9:00 PM Eastern. My guests have been Errol Morris and Jacob Soboroff. Thank you so much for your time today.

Errol Morris: Thank you.

Jacob Soboroff: Thank you.