In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice began implementing a secret program: the “zero tolerance” program. Migrant families crossing the southern border were to have their children taken from them and sent to detention camps around the country. More than 4,000 children, including hundreds under the age of five, were pulled from their mothers and fathers, and more than a thousand still have not been reunited.
The latest film by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (Fog of War) combines documentary with the fictional story of a Guatemalan family to revisit this policy, with a focus on the dark, mysterious bureaucratic decisions that led to its implementation. He spoke with Mark Danner about Separated.
MARK DANNER: The film gives new meaning to some overused words: chilling, Kafkaesque. It made me think of Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem—the great account of how bureaucracy can lead to cruelty.
ERROL MORRIS: I just reread it. I remembered the book as being great, but I was wrong. It’s even better than I remembered it.
I want to ask you about bureaucracy. When the family separation policy starts happening in 2017, it’s not really a policy. Nobody knows who’s ordering it. No one will admit it’s a policy.
But children who’ve been separated from their parents start coming in. The policy began in an unknown way. I found that incredibly creepy. Officially, it wasn’t happening. Jonathan White [an officer at Health and Human Services] says, “We’re seeing more and more separated children.” Answer: “No, you’re not.” “Yes, we are.”
I found this denial of the policy by the people who had clearly ordered it to be extraordinarily chilling.
And why deny them? If you like these policies, if there’s nothing to be ashamed of, why not just simply embrace them? Their end goal is cruelty—cruelty for its own sake. It’s the joy of being a hard-ass, the joy of power, the joy of power over people.
The film shows that cruelty extremely vividly. I was chilled by the use of power against children. A thousand have not been returned to their families. Think of that.
I think about that quite often. There is a punitive element in separating people in a way that they could never be reunited. They wouldn’t even keep records of what they were doing, as if they might not have been doing it, or weren’t doing it, or couldn’t care about the fact that they were doing it. It’s extraordinarily nasty and sad.
Why do you think cruelty has such an appeal in politics?
Hate is energizing. What did William Blake say? “Cruelty has a human heart and terror is the human form divine.”
It’s hard to explain these policies any other way. You could say they had some kind of pragmatic purpose. “Oh, we did this because it would be a way of controlling immigration from the south. People would see that they would be separated from their children and think twice about crossing the border.” I don’t think so.
I don’t have any clear understanding about Trump’s appeal. Clearly, he does not appeal to me, but he appeals to a lot of people. Anger and cruelty are always appealing.
Your mix of live action and documentary is seamless in this movie and beautifully and powerfully done.
I’ve asked, “Why the use of drama and documentary in this film?” It’s the best way, as far as I could tell, to tell the story. This is a story about so many levels of betrayal.
Among those is the forced betrayal of parents of their children. It’s the most horrible betrayal of all. The child basically believes the separation was his mother’s choice. Mother had abandoned him, and why? How could you do that to me? And her answer is, I had no choice. It’s a tragedy.
The movie is supposedly about the past, but it’s not. It’s about a possible future as well.
Trump has said that he would reinstitute these policies. So yes, there’s nothing that prevents this from being reinstituted. There’s no sense of shame or guilt, nothing.
Errol, congratulations. This is a great and vital work. I think maybe you’re getting the hang of this.
I think I am. Maybe I’m learning something. And hopefully I’ll get a chance to do it again.
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