Book Talk with NBC/MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff

Please join us for another segment of Chaucer’s Books Virtual Author Discussions with NBC/MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff as he discusses his book SEPARATED: INSIDE AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY with author, professor and UCSB Chicano Studies department chair, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval on Thursday, November 19 at 6 pm!

To attend,  please click on this link:https://www.chaucersbooks.com/event/virtual-event-jacob-soboroff-separated-inside-american-tragedy

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“The seminal book on the child-separation policy.” —Rachel Maddow

The award-winning NBC News correspondent lays bare the full truth behind the Trump administration’s systematic separation of families at the US-Mexico border

In June 2018, Donald Trump’s most notorious decision as president had secretly been in effect for months before most Americans became aware of the astonishing inhumanity being perpetrated by their own government. Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose this reality after seeing firsthand the living conditions of the children in custody. His influential series of reports ignited public scrutiny that contributed to the president reversing his own policy and earned Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism.

But beyond the headlines, the complete, multilayered story lay untold. 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?

Soboroff has spent the past two years reporting the many strands of this complex narrative, developing sources from within the Trump administration who share critical details for the first time. He also traces the dramatic odyssey of one separated family from Guatemala, where their lives were threatened by narcos, to seek asylum at the U.S. border, where they were separated—the son ending up in Texas, and the father thousands of miles away, in the Mojave desert of central California. And he joins the heroes who emerged to challenge the policy, and who worked on the ground to reunite parents with children.

In this essential reckoning, Soboroff weaves together these key voices with his own experience covering this national issue—at the border in Texas, California, and Arizona; with administration officials in Washington, D.C., and inside the disturbing detention facilities. Separated lays out compassionately, yet in the starkest of terms, its human toll, and makes clear what is at stake in the 2020 presidential election.

– Read Less

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. He co-presented (with Katy Tur) the four-part event docuseries American Swamp on MSNBC. He lives in Los Angeles.

“As a correspondent for NBC News, Soboroff was among the the first to report on the Trump administration’s family separation policy; here, he digs deeper into its roots and consequences.”

–New York Times Book Review, ‘New & Notable’

“Phenomenal. Please read it.” 

–Andrew Zimmern (via Twitter)

“Jacob Soboroff has done A LOT of very good work on [immigration policy]. I hope you will buy his book and educate yourself on the horrors Donald Trump inflicted on so many innocent families and children.”

–Don Winslow, author of The Border (via Twitter)

“Jacob Soboroff, an award-winning NBC correspondent, delves deep into the Trump’s administration’s systematic family separation practice. It’s a bleak but necessary read about why this inhumane policy is allowed to happen in America.”

–Cosmopolitan, ‘Best Nonfiction Books of 2020’