The award-winning NBC News correspondent lays bare the full truth
behind the Trump administration’s systematic separation of
desperate migrant families at the US-Mexico border
In June 2018, Donald
Trump’s most notorious decision as president had secretly been in
effect for months before most Americans became aware of the
astonishing inhumanity being perpetrated by their own government.
Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose this reality
after seeing firsthand the living conditions of the children in
custody. His influential series of reports ignited public scrutiny
that contributed to the president reversing his own policy and earned
Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast
Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for
Broadcast Journalism.
But beyond the
headlines, the complete, multilayered story lay untold. How, exactly,
had such a humanitarian tragedy—now deemed “torture” by
physicians—happened on American soil? Most important, what has been
the human experience of those separated children and parents?
Soboroff has spent
the past two years reporting the many strands of this complex
narrative, developing sources from within the Trump administration
who share critical details for the first time. He also traces the
dramatic odyssey of one separated family from Guatemala, where their
lives were threatened by narcos, to seek asylum at the U.S. border,
where they were separated—the son ending up in Texas, and the
father thousands of miles away, in the Mojave desert of central
California. And he joins the heroes who emerged to challenge the
policy, and who worked on the ground to reunite parents with
children.
In this essential
reckoning, Soboroff weaves together these key voices with his own
experience covering this national issue—at the border in Texas,
California, and Arizona; with administration officials in Washington,
D.C., and inside the disturbing detention facilities. Separated
lays out compassionately, yet in the starkest of terms, its human
toll, and makes clear what is at stake in the 2020 presidential
election.