PART ONE: DEPARTURE

CHAPTER ONE: CONFRONTING CRUELTY

The contents of this chapter are drawn from personal interviews with Jodi Goodwin, and other RGV humanitarians who worked with her, alongside her, or in observation of her throughout 2018 and into 2019.

These collective accounts were further informed by the frontline journalism of Jacob Soboroff (MSNBC) and Julia Ainsley (NBC), Ginger Thompson (ProPublica), Lomi Kriel (Houston Chronicle), Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Molly O'Toole (LA Times), Caitlin Dickerson (then of The NY Times), Hamed Aleaziz (then of Buzzfeed), Camilo Montoya-Galvez (CBS), Dianne Solis (Dallas Morning News), Miriam Jordan (WAPO), Robert Moore (El Paso Matters), and others who witnessed and reported on the crimes of Zero Tolerance and Family Separation as they unfolded in real-time.

To root the chapter context in historical context, I learned much from the work of Aura Bogado from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting on the issue of the treatment of unaccompanied children in the custody of the US Department of Health & Human Services and the Office of Refugee Resettlement. I drew historical lessons, as well, from the work of Susan Schmidt and Jacqueline Bhabha in Seeking Asylum Alone: Unaccompanied and Separated Children and Refugee Protection in the U.S. (2006). Their work also serves the perspective developed in Chapter 19, Locking up Family Values.

For a full understanding and fact-checking on both lawsuits mentioned, Ms. L v. Ice and Dora v. Sessions (see pages 12, 13, 14, and 17), I interviewed ACLU lead attorney, Lee Gelernt, and child psychiatrist Dr. Amy Cohen of Each Step Home, who were also instrumental in informing my research for Chapter 20: Barbarians at the Gate and Chapter 18: Kidnapped by Uncle Sam, respectively.

My research on the historical roots of asylum included a study of the 1848 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol, the 2013 Cartegena Declaration on Refugees, which allows a broader category of persons in need of international protection to be considered as refugees, and other treaty bodies that make up the International Refugee Protection Regime, as a participant of the Oxford Centre for Refugee Studies 2021 International Institute. This included, as well, insights into the ancient tradition of asylum as it is expressed in the sacred texts of the world’s major religions.

My understanding of asylum was also informed by my bi-monthly access to the national US-based Asylum Working Group from the fall of 2020, as well as by the highly readable must-read book by John Washington, The Dispossessed.

Other books on the topic of Family Separation, during Trump’s one-term administration and otherwise, that informed this manuscript and which I recommend without reservation are:

Jacob Soboroff

Laura Briggs

Efren Olivares

You will find further details on the Flores Settlement Agreement in Chapters 12, 17, and 19.