On a recent evening in Washington, moviegoers filled the lobby of a local theater to watch the D.C. premiere of a new film from a renowned documentarian that explores the first Trump administration's family separation policy on the U.S. southern border.

I recently sat down with one of the executive producers of the film, separated.

Systematic separation of children from parents.

Officially, it wasn't happening, but it was happening.

The new documentary, Separated, is a searing exploration of the first Trump administration's

zero-tolerance immigration policy at the U.S.-Mexico border,

which forcibly separated over 5,000 migrant children from their families who illegally entered the country.

Directed by the legendary documentarian Errol Morris, the film is based on a book of the same name

by NBC news journalist Jacob Soberoff, who's also one of the film's executive

producers.

One of the things that so often gets lost in conversations about Trump's family separation

policy is that harm to children was the point.

And in fact, one of the civil servants who you speak with in the film says that.

It was meant to terrify parents from making that trek from those Northern Triangle countries to the U.S.

Based on the facts that we know, which in this film are firsthand interviews with civil servants who tried to stand up and stop the policy and, in fact, help the policy reversal.

We know what they wanted to do.

They wanted to hurt kids in order to scare other families from coming to this country and scare

Congress into enacting more restrictive immigration laws.

It's exactly the way that they drew it up and exactly what they wanted to do.

One of the civil servants who offers a first-hand account is Jonathan White, who worked for the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

And the unaccompanied children program, which I worked in,

was essentially hijacked for a purpose for which it was never intended,

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