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This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross.

The secret history of the U.S. government's family separation policy is the cover

story of the new issue of the Atlantic magazine.

This investigative article was written by my guest, Caitlin Dickerson.

The separation policy, called Zero Tolerance, was created during the Trump administration,

mandating that parents across the southern border illegally, with children, be separated

from their children until legal proceedings concluded and parents are either granted

asylum or deported, which could take a very long time.

During the Trump administration, over 5,000 children were separated from their parents

with no records that would enable parents and children to be reunited.

For a year and a half, Trump administration officials denied that family separation even existed.

Then they said, separation wasn't the goal.

It was just an unfortunate result of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally.

But Dickerson found that separating children wasn't a side effect.

She says it was the intent.

She writes that instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted,

officials worked to keep them apart for longer.

Her article titled, We Need to Take Away Children, is based on the year and a half

investigation she conducted, which included more than 150 interviews and reviewing thousands

of pages of internal government documents, some of which would turn over to her after a multi-year

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