Separate Review – Errol Morris’s Quiet, Furious Criticism of Trump’s Inhumane Border Policy | Venice Film Festival 2024
TThe Trump administration’s southern border policy began with the dream of a wall in the desert and ended with the nightmare of family separation: children torn from their parents and crammed en masse into wire cages. It was inhumane treatment, and that was precisely the point. The White House’s intention was to use terror as a deterrent and to enshrine in law every parent’s worst fear. “When you have that policy, people don’t come,” Donald Trump said casually. “I know it sounds harsh, but we have to save our country.”
Errol Morris’s legal-procedural documentary takes us behind the scenes of the bureaucracy to show how the policy was developed and implemented. It details how its principal authors—Trump adviser Andrew Miller and Attorney General Jeff Sessions—abandoned the preexisting catch-and-release system (which allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearings) in favor of a bold new tactic of forced separation and mass incarceration. If Separated lacks the rueful exuberance that characterizes much of Morris’s early work (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, even last year’s John le Carré film), that’s understandable. The material is spare, and the mountain of evidence requires sifting through. The filmmaker handles his case with the cold, hard precision of a master state’s attorney.
Miller and Sessions, unsurprisingly, declined to be interviewed. But Morris managed to get an audience with Scott Lloyd, the smiling handyman parachuted in to head the Office of Refugee Resettlement. By following orders and giving in to the whims of his superiors, the amiable and bedazzled Lloyd suddenly found himself the de facto legal guardian of some 4,000 caged children—or, as one of his detractors prefers to put it, “the most prolific child molester in American history.”
One of the hallmarks of the Trump administration has been its brazen ability to hijack and defenestrate quiet federal offices, filling offices with loyalists, and forcing longtime employees to back down or step down. Separated cleverly allows these outraged and stubborn officials to have their moment on the witness stand — especially Capt. Jonathan White of the Unaccompanied Alien Children program, who is clearly still angry about the level of mess he was first tasked with creating and then cleaning up.
The film struggles to weave together these powerful testimonies with dramatized scenes of a Guatemalan mother and son crossing the border. While this complementary narrative helps fill in the gaps in an operation that took place largely out of sight and in secret, it also draws attention to the complete absence of migrants’ voices in the film. It’s fitting that Morris focuses on policymakers and foot soldiers. But a direct word from the victims might also have helped his cause.
Leaked audio of traumatized infants, along with photos of minors locked up like battery hens, finally brought an end to family separation. Faced with growing public anger and condemnation from the Pope, Trump hastily signed an executive order declaring the case closed, heedless of the fact that his subordinates suggested strategically “losing” the official list of separated children to protect themselves from prosecution, and that up to 1,000 of them remain missing to this day. Cruelty was the point. In documenting Trump’s family separation policy, Separated shows the path America took to darkness. It is a demanding, harrowing, and quietly furious film.
