Did You Think You Might Find an Excel File?

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I didn't think that i was going to find an excel file. I knew i wouldn't, because i had so many sources in government who worked on the court mandated effort to reunify separated families. The best answer for that is that anybody who would have wanted to create such an excel file had kind of long been cut out of the conversation by the time zero tolerance was approved. It was part of this false narrative that kind of developed overtime. Ta, you know, we've done this before, which was never true.

Caitlin Dickerson is a staff writer for The Atlantic covering immigration. Her latest article, on the secret history of U.S. government’s family-separation policy, is ”An American Catastrophe.”

“Interviewing separated families, I’ve found, is just on a whole other scale of pain and trauma. I’ve watched people have really intense PTSD flashbacks in front of me. I never wanted to risk asking a family to open up in that way if I didn’t know that I’d be able to use that material. The worst thing you can do is waste someone’s time in a way that causes them pain.”

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