Setting the Wrong Standard: A Review of Separated:

Abstract

From 2017 to 2019, Soboroff covered “the greatest human-rights catastrophe” on American soil, uncovering the systematic separation of migrant families at the US-Mexico border, which had become the official policy of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).1 The author’s experience brings a personal element to his fact-based reporting, which skillfully incorporates sources from the DHS, Office of Refugee Resettlement, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Health and Human Services (HHS), and global immigration-focused nonprofits. Even when the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) condemned the policy for being an “arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life” and “a serious violation of the rights of the child,” the evasion of responsibility continued.8 In a statement following the accusation, former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley wrote, “While the High Commissioner’s office ignorantly attacks the United States with words, the United States leads the world with its actions.” After his harrowing descriptions of children wailing for their parents in overcrowded detention centers, it is not surprising that PHR discovered mental health conditions in many of the young children they evaluated.12 In a report from October 2020, PHR detailed the conditions brought about by the trauma of family separation, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder.13 In an article for Human Rights Watch, senior quantitative analyst Brain Root explains that family separation in the United States is symptomatic of a much larger global problem: a disregard for the basic human rights of migrants.14 At the height of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, xenophobic policies put into place by populist leaders from Italy to Hungary were similarly justified by national security. In 2019, the DHS implemented the Migrant Protection Protocols, or the Remain in Mexico policy, which primarily targeted asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico.17 Under this policy, asylum seekers were forced to wait for delayed asylum hearings in makeshift camps on the other side of the border, where the risk of homicide, femicide, kidnapping, and sexual assault was high.