Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Errol Morris confronts one of the darkest chapters in recent American history: family | dG1fXzlrMDhqeWtrcFU
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Separation from your parent is a profoundly traumatizing event.
00:06With systematic separation of children from parents,
00:11officially, it wasn't happening.
00:14But it was happening.
00:16♪
00:19You should tell me how you got involved in all of this.
00:22Define all this.
00:25Their version of stopping people from coming into the country
00:28was taking children away from their parents
00:31so that people wouldn't come.
00:33Our field staff started to notice very young kids,
00:37tender age, anyone below five.
00:40That's kind of unusual, right?
00:42♪
00:46It was a very difficult time.
00:49That's kind of unusual, right?
00:51♪
00:54What Zero Tolerance did was turn their helpers
00:59into their worst nightmare.
01:01Freeze! Freeze!
01:03Don't move! Don't move!
01:05♪
01:12So if you thought the child was endangered,
01:15that's the only circumstance to which you would separate.
01:18Can't imagine doing it otherwise.
01:20The government thought that showing the world separations
01:24through the eyes of people like me,
01:26they would scare the s*** out of people
01:28that were attempting to come from coming.
01:30Is that the right strategy?
01:31If you're part of a family and you break the law,
01:33you will be incarcerated.
01:35I've honestly never seen anything like that.
01:37There are about 1,500 kids in there.
01:40You're a parent.
01:42Don't you have any empathy for what they go through?
01:45We now know this was right from the get-go.
01:47Someone must have been planning this.
01:49A federal judge says the government needs to reunite
01:51young immigrant children with their parents.
01:53We had 14 days to reunify all of the children under five.
01:57Their assessment form in the system
01:59doesn't have that much information.
02:01What's your mom's name? Mom.
02:03Like every mom, their name is Mom.
02:05Do I call this child abuse?
02:07Do I call it torture?
02:09Separation was the purpose.
02:12Prosecution was the tool.
02:15It's not over.
02:17Five years later, we are still trying to reunite
02:19up to 1,000 children.
02:23There is really nothing to stop it.
02:25This is a new era.
02:28It troubles me profoundly
02:32that it could happen again.