"The accountability for family separation was just a huge question mark when i got started," she says. "All these complicated work place dynamics, these personal, you know, identity dynamics and political dynamics ... All tose dynamics started coming up right away in my interviews."
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.”
Show notes:
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