In Conversation: On Separated: Inside An American Tragedy, and the US-Mexico border

Soledad O’Brien is an award-winning documentarian, journalist, speaker, author, and philanthropist, who founded Soledad O’Brien Productions, a multi-platform media production company dedicated to telling empowering and authentic stories on a range of social issues. She anchors and produces the Hearst TV political magazine program “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien” and is a correspondent for HBO Real Sports. She is a thought leader, with over 1.3 million Twitter followers, who has a national impact through her speeches, numerous documentaries and her presence on the op-ed pages of platforms like the New York Times and Huffington Post. She has anchored shows on CNN, MSNBC, and NBC, and reported for Fox, A&E, Oxygen, Nat Geo, the PBS NewsHour, WebMD, and Al Jazeera America, among others. O’Brien’s work has been recognized with three Emmy awards, twice with the George Foster Peabody Award, three times with the Gracie Award, which honors women in media, twice with Cine Awards for her work in documentary films and also with an Alfred I. DuPont Award.

Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. For his reporting on the child-separation policy, he received the 2019 Walter Cronkite Award for Individual Achievement by a National Journalist and the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. He has appeared on Today, Morning Joe, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and numerous other programs. Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose the astonishing inhumanity of Donald Trump’s family separation border policies. But beyond the headlines there was an untold, multilayered story. How, exactly, had such a humanitarian tragedy—now deemed “torture” by physicians—happened on American soil? Most important, what has been the human experience of those separated children and parents? In Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (Custom House) Soboroff reports on the many strands of a complex narrative. He develops sources from within the Trump administration, but also traces the dramatic odyssey of one separated family from Guatemala. Threatened by narcos at home, they seek asylum at the U.S. border, where they were separated—the son ending up in Texas, and the father in the Mojave desert, in California. And Soboroff also introduces us to the heroes who challenged the policy and worked on the ground to reunite parents with children. Andrea Mitchel (MSNBC) called it “A detailed, graphic account of the Trump administration’s horrendous policy of family separations. … Groundbreaking work. … All the original reporting in this book is extraordinary.”