Caitlin Dickerson on the Moral Catastrophe of Family Separations

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, joined staff writer Caitlin Dickerson to discuss her cover story, a years-long investigation into the secret history of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy. Dickerson’s story argues that separating children was not an unintended side effect, as previously claimed, but its core intent. How did officials work to keep families apart longer? Did they obscure the truth to both Congress and the public? What will happen if the Trump administration is restored to power in the 2024 election? This dialogue is an edited and condensed version of a conversation Dickerson and Goldberg had on Friday for The Atlantic’s “Big Story” broadcast.

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Jeffrey Goldberg: When did you realize that the Trump administration was doing something new?

Caitlin Dickerson: There were two things here that really stood out from the norm in my experience as a reporter. The first, with family separations, is just the mere fact that they took place in relative secrecy. In 2017, hundreds of separations took place starting out in El Paso, Texas, in a program that later expanded. But when reporters would ask about it, the administration would tell us, “No, this isn’t happening. You know, we’re not separating families.” There’s some complicated reasons for that which we can get into, but that’s really not normal. As a reporter, you’re used to hearing “no comment” in response to a story that the government doesn’t want you to report. Or you’re used to hearing a public-affairs officer offer some context that at least helps to soften the blow of a story that they know the public is not going to react kindly to. But in this case, we actually got denials.

And then, of course, having looked back at immigration policy all the way back to the 19th century in the United States, separating children from their parents as an immigration policy hasn’t happened before. It was the harshest application any of us have seen of this basic concept of prevention by deterrence, which is how we approach immigration enforcement generally. And it was so harsh and painful for parents and for children, and continues to be, that I had to stick with it.

Goldberg: So to be clear, no presidential administration going back all the way had ever done anything this dramatic?

Dickerson: No. As you know, there are examples of kids being taken from their parents in American history, though not in a border context. We’ve had some pretty cruel and pretty harsh border-enforcement policies. But the forcible separation of children from their parents is just not something that the Border Patrol has ever engaged in in American history.

One of the great achievements of your story is that you take us all the way into the bureaucratic decision making that allowed this to happen. But somebody had to think of this first. The assumption, on