Jacob Soboroff was working as a correspondent for NBC and MSNBC at the end of 2015, covering immigration on the US-Mexico border. On the occasion of a press tour inside a detention facility in Brownsville where 1500 young boys were being held and where reporters were not allowed to bring in recording equipment, Jacob Soboroff put pen to paper, writing notes and filling the pages of a small notebook. Those notes became the seedbed of Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, an expansive, complex, and multi-layered story about the immigration crisis and the policy that separates families seeking asylum in the United States.