Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity
Separated is an oral history project with families impacted by the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy which forcibly separated fathers and mothers from their children at the U.S. Mexico border.
In the summer of 2018, news broke that the Trump Administration had adopted a radical new policy to deter people from crossing the border: separating children from their parents.
Word of the policy provoked outrage and galvanized tens of thousands around the country and the world to take to the streets. Within weeks, the administration was forced to rescind the policy. But the damage was done.
More than 4,200 children had been taken from their parents and hundreds of parents deported to their countries of origin while their children remained in the U.S., resulting in months or years of separation.
Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity documents this historic human rights violation. It records the stories of mothers and fathers, daughters and sons to ensure their stories of resistance and solidarity are not forgotten.
Beyond archiving stories for posterity, the project further seeks to bring them into the public conversation in the present. Developed in collaboration not only with advocacy organizations but also with family members themselves, Separated serves as a platform for families who have experienced separation to transform injustice into action.
Since 2020, the project has interviewed 29 parents and 6 children who experienced separation under Zero Tolerance policy. In 2022, the project also interviewed 13 human rights workers in Guatemala about their experience searching for families who were separated and later deported back to their home countries.