Separated Quotes

“The days of massive hauls of marijuana across the southern border had already started to taper off. With pot being grown and sold in a regulated market, the need for it to be smuggled from Mexico into the United States was fading away.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“That night, my colleague Rachel Maddow broke down, crying live on the air as she read a late-breaking Associated Press story. “This has just come out from the Associated Press.” She paused for three seconds while reading the copy on the page in front of her. “This is incredible.” She began reading the article aloud. “Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children,” her voice breaking, she stopped, waved her pen with her right hand, pointed to her mouth, pursed her lips, and let out an audible sigh.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“Since the summer of 2017, the Trump administration has taken at least 5,556 kids from their parents.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“we feel out here, too,” I replied.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“Hold on,” she said, still not looking up from the page and laughing a nervous laughter I had never seen her do before. Her right index finger stretched under her nose as if to hold in what she could not, she kept reading through intense emotion. “To at least three . . .” She stopped again, finger back under her nose. She wagged her finger at the camera and shook her head, I think trying to make what she was feeling go away. For five seconds, she said nothing, breathing heavily, and then out loud, a message to her control room. “Put up the graphic of this. Thank you. Do we have it? No.” She had nowhere to hide. “Three tender-aged shelters in South Texas. Lawyers and medical providers . . .” She started crying.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“Chavez was the same Border Patrol official who, in December, had inadvertently admitted to an Office of Refugee Resettlement staffer the Border Patrol had been working on scaling up family separations. Now, she had written Commander White with a request. Chavez wished to better understand the release of unaccompanied minors in the custody of his department. Children who were separated would be rendered “unaccompanied,” despite the fact they didn’t arrive as such.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“July 2018 HHS identifies 2,654 separated children under Ms. L v. ICE.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“What Commander White was saying would have been clear to McAleenan: yes, separations had happened in the past, including during the Obama administration, but only in the limited circumstance of a family being apprehended and the parent or parents in that family committing a criminal act. Now, it appeared, more and more families were being separated for no other reason than they had crossed the border illegally, and they were being charged with the crime of illegal entry. This had never happened in a widespread fashion before.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“The government was separating children and parents and losing track of who they were and where they went.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“In fact, it was different. Crossing the border is a civil crime, adjudicated in immigration court, and only if prosecutors decide to press charges do families get placed into criminal proceedings.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“Evidence directly contradicting what President Trump had been saying was right in front of my eyes: most hard narcotics were not coming through unwalled areas, they were entering through legal ports of entry, just like this one. None more so than right here between San Diego and Tijuana.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“This was the same Jeff Sessions who, in a publicly broadcast conversation with Steve Bannon in 2015, before both were members of the Trump administration, praised a racist 1924 law intended, by its authors’ own admission, to end “indiscriminate acceptance of all races” as “good for America.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“Since the summer of 2017, the Trump administration has taken at least 5,556 kids from their parents. But still today, nobody knows for sure exactly how many families have been separated. In February 2020, the United States Government Accountability Office noted, “it is unclear the extent to which Border Patrol has accurate records of separated [families] in its data system.” Scarce few of their stories have been told.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“The Trump administration was potentially “creating thousands of immigrant orphans,” as a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement put it, by deporting separated parents before they were given a chance to reunite. When”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“What follows is my attempt to fill in the blanks that I did not understand in real time. I started by revisiting my notes, as well as my public reporting, seeking to retrace my steps over two years. I pored through hundreds of pages of documents, obtained by myself and others, including NGOs doggedly filing public records requests. Still more files have been made publicly available through investigations by inspectors general and Congress. To contextualize these documents, I spoke with dozens of sources, from those responsible for considering, implementing, then unwinding the policy, to others who were caught in its crosshairs. I heard from people who participated in and experienced the policy on the border, and some of those who directed it from Washington, including, at times, from inside the White House itself. What I have now unequivocally learned is that the Trump administration’s family separation policy was an avoidable catastrophe made worse by people who could have made it better at multiple inflection points, which I’ll share with you here in a series of pivotal moments presented as scenes. The dialogue you’ll read in these pages is reconstructed, when I was present, to the best of my memory or using recordings made as part of my reporting.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“Since the summer of 2017, the Trump administration has taken at least 5,556 kids from their parents. But still today, nobody knows for sure exactly how many families have been separated.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy

“This place is called a shelter, but effectively these kids are incarcerated.”
― Jacob Soboroff, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy