“Separated:” A Film Screening and Conversation on U.S. Immigration Policy and Migrant’s Rights

This event will feature a screening of the new film "Separated" by Oscar winner Errol Morris, which documents the systematic separation of migrant families at the hands of the U.S. government. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Poynter Fellow and Executive Producer Jacob Soboroff (NBC News Political and National Correspondent) and Lee Gelernt (Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project) moderated by Professor Dylan Gee (Psychology). Doors will open at 6pm, and the event is open to the public.

Synopsis: Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Errol Morris confronts one of the darkest chapters in recent American history: family separations. Based on NBC News Political and National Correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book, "Separated: Inside an American Tragedy," Morris merges bombshell interviews with government officials and artful narrative vignettes tracing one migrant family’s plight. Together they show that the cruelty at the heart of this policy was its very purpose. Against this backdrop, audiences can begin to absorb the U.S. government’s role in developing and implementing policies that have kept over 1300 children without confirmed reunifications years later, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

About the Speakers:

Jacob Soboroff is an NBC News Political and National Correspondent. He is also the author of The New York Times best seller Separated: Inside an American Tragedy and an Executive Producer of Separated, a film by Errol Morris. For his reporting on the Trump administration’s child separation policy, Soboroff received the Walter Cronkite Award for Individual Achievement by a National Journalist and the Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. He is also the recipient of a Ruben Salazar Journalism Award from the California Chicano News Media Association, and in 2022 was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy® Award for his reporting from Haiti.

Lee Gelernt is a lawyer at the ACLU’s national office in New York. He is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading public interest lawyers and has argued dozens of major civil rights cases during his career, including in the U.S. Supreme Court and virtually every federal court of appeals in the country. He has also testified as a legal expert before both the House and Senate. In addition to his work at the ACLU, he is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, and for several years was a visiting professor at Yale Law School.