Separated - by Jacob Soboroff (Paperback)

About the Book

"A deeply reported, newsbreaking account the humanitarian crisis of our time by the journalist who has been at the center of the story: MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff, winner of the 2019 Walter Cronkite Award, offers a chilling expose of the human cost of the Trump administration's border and immigration policies"--

Book Synopsis

Now a major film by Academy Award winner Errol Morris

"The seminal book on the child-separation policy." --Rachel Maddow

Award-winning NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff lays bare the full truth behind America's systematic separation of families at the US-Mexico border. Featuring updated reporting and a new afterword.

New York Times Bestseller Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist American Book Award Winner American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award Finalist

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 as America struggles to reset its immigration policies post-Trump.

Review Quotes

"Separated, by the MSNBC and NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff, shows how the Trump administration implemented a policy that amounted to a humanitarian catastrophe: systematically taking children from their migrant parents at the border. ... Will give you a sense of how the United States, a country that prides itself on its constitutional protections, also possesses a body of immigration laws that can be weaponized by an executive branch willing to do it. ... [A] horrifying story. ... Highlight[s] the secrecy and 'extraordinary confusion' of the process. ... What Soboroff memorably depicts isn't just tragic but brutal. Any soaring rhetoric about yearning to breathe free has been traded in for the crudest of threats: If you try to come here, just look at what we're willing to do." - Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"To experience the pain and anger many suburban voters felt about Trump's policy of ripping children from the arms of their asylum-seeking parents along the southern border, I'd recommend Separated: Inside an American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff." - Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
"Groundbreaking. ... All the original reporting in this book is extraordinary." - Andrea Mitchell
"The seminal book on the child-separation policy." - Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show
"This book is important. Everyone should read it. We have to face our demons as a country, and this is an opportunity to face our demons." - Joy-Ann Reid
"Jacob Soboroff's excellent reporting at the border helped shine a light on Trump's cruel family separation policy. His new book, Separated, is a sobering account of what he saw and the human toll of the Trump agenda." - Julián Castro
"Soboroff's thoroughly engaging exposé of the inner workings of a corrupt and unfeeling government is essential to understanding America's current immigration misery." - Booklist (starred review)
"Jacob Soboroff's new book Separated is a kind of skeleton key to understanding the full totality of all the incompetence and cruelty on display by this administration in this era." - Chris Hayes (via Twitter)
"As a correspondent for NBC News, Soboroff was among the the first to report on the Trump administration's family separation policy; here, he digs deeper into its roots and consequences." - New York Times Book Review, "New & Notable"
"Jacob Soboroff zooms in on President Trump and his administration's decision to separate children from their parents as a deterrent to border crossers. In doing so, he illuminates how, in the face of congressional inaction, a cadre of presidential advisers can introduce policies with shocking, unintended consequences. ... With the immediacy of cable news, Soboroff attempts to reconstruct the quiet run-up to the public acknowledgment of the policy, including one official's efforts to destroy the internal list of separated parents and children. He interweaves this reporting with his own on-the-ground work as one of the first journalists to enter detention facilities holding the separated children. And he follows Juan and José, a Guatemalan father and son seeking asylum who are swept into the maw of the separation machine. ... Soboroff, who acknowledges that he came to the story late, offers generous recognition to fellow journalists and the advocates who saw the looming crisis well before he did. ... Ultimately, the reporter is the protagonist, providing the book's strength and emotional core." - Laura Wides-Muñoz, Washington Post
"Jacob Soboroff zooms in on President Trump and his administration's decision to separate children from their parents as a deterrent to border crossers. In doing so, he illuminates how, in the face of congressional inaction, a cadre of presidential advisers can introduce policies with shocking, unintended consequences." - Laura Wides-Muñoz, Washington Post
"Fantastic. ... Serves as a blueprint, honestly, for everything that we are seeing now in the pandemic, everything wrong with this administration, it's all right there in black and white. ... The book is fantastic, the reporting is fantastic." - Chris Hayes