I was shocked that to this day many people involved in this decision-making

still don't understand how immigration enforcement works. Today we're bringing you a conversation between our editor and chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and staff writer Caitlin Dickerson.

Caitlin is the author of the recent piece, an American catastrophe,

a comprehensive investigation of the Trump administration's policy

of separating migrant children from their families.

Caitlin, we have a good amount of time but we've got a lot to cover so let me jump in and

why don't we just start at the beginning and by the beginning I mean the beginning of your interest in immigration as a subject and in particular

when you came to realize that the Trump administration was doing something

novel in terms of its enforcement or its ideology surrounding preventing illegal immigration.

Why don't you just start with like when you came to the beat?

Obviously it wasn't at the Atlantic, you can take us back a little ways.

Sure, so I actually fell into immigration reporting because immigration happened to be something

that I knew a lot about when I started out as a journalist and as you know Jeff early

on in a newsroom your job is to kind of stand out and have

smart ideas and show that you can bring something to the table when you're working alongside

people who've been doing this a lot longer than you and so I was a production assistant in NPR that was my first job in journalism

Had grown up in a part of the country that has lots of immigrants in Merced, California in the Central Valley and then studied it in college.

So my best pitches were always immigration stories and so naturally when I became a reporter I began to cover it. In 2016 I was hired to cover

immigration at the New York Times. It was the summer of 2016 and at that point a lot of the

country and a lot of news media assumed that

Hillary Clinton would become the next president of course she didn't become the

next president and so all of a sudden my mandate changed really dramatically and you know the time

...