Oscar-winning filmmakerErrol Morris, for one, doesnt mince words in his assessment of it.
A policy of cruelty.
of Health and Human Services.
A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas.John Moore/Getty Images
Some of the children were infants.
He serves as an executive producer of the film and appears on camera in it.
Zero Tolerance, the Trump administrations umbrella term that authorized family separations, was announced in May 2018.
A temporary detention centre for illegal underage immigrants in Tornillo, Texas, near the Mexico-U.S. border on June 18, 2018.HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images
Secretly, immigration authorities had been separating migrant families for at least a year beforehand.
And as Adam Serwer sort of coined inThe Atlanticat the time, the cruelty was the point.
I say that as, I believe, an objective journalist who saw this with my own eyes.
Theres really two movies here.
Two movies for the price of one, he says wryly.
A little over a month after announcing the family separation policy in 2018, President Trump abandoned it.
Public outrage, to a large degree bipartisan, forced his hand.
For him, it was a superficial reason, not a moral reason.
Morris chimes in, He didnt like the optics!
Separateddoesnt let the Democratic Party off the hook.
Soboroff says the whole thrust of U.S. immigration enforcement policy has been punitive and not humanitarian.
The legacy of family separation is still with us.
According to the Dept.
But we do know that our governments response to it is shameful.
We should be ashamed of what happened, and we should seek that its not repeated ever again.
