From the war in Ukraine to the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, Jacob Soboroff is no stranger to covering tragedy. His first-hand account of family separations along the Southern border during Trump’s first term became a bestselling book and later the critically acclaimed documentary “Separated” by Academy Award winning director Errol Morris. Now, Soboroff is back chronicling the human toll and devastating impact of Trump’s new immigration crackdown, including an exclusive interview for “The Best People”: with Narciso Barranco, the gardener and father of three whose violent detention by masked ICE agents in California this June went viral.
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Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Jacob Soboroff: Here’s the bottom line: the American people are being lied to by this administration about who they are going after and why and how, and all you got to do is open both of your eyes and watch television, listen to your broadcast. And you realize that these are families. These are fathers and daughters and mothers and sons, and all of it who are caught in the middle of this, not, not only, and not primarily the worst of the worst.
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Nicolle Wallace: Hi, everybody. Welcome to The Best People podcast. We are so lucky to have this week’s guest with us. The best people, we have learned, are usually the ones carrying the brightest lights. And that is most certainly the case with this week’s guest. He’s used his light as a public conscience and a tool for accountability. He has sought to shine his journalist eye on some of the most tragic and consequential chapters in recent months and years. He’s also fearless and funny and a whole lot of fun to be with. He is without or doubt one of the best people I get to work with. So, this is The Best People, and this is Jacob Soboroff. Thank you for being here, my friend.
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Jacob Soboroff: You know that the feeling is mutual, Nicolle. I know, you know that.
Nicolle Wallace: Well, I’m so glad to get to do this because the one thing I always feel on the show is that there’s never enough time.
Jacob Soboroff: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: Sometimes that’s a good thing because I leave in tears, but I’m glad to get to have this time with you.
Jacob Soboroff: Thank you sincerely for having me, I’m really excited to do this.
Nicolle Wallace: Let me start upside down. Usually there is something happening in the streets and you bring the actual stories to us, and to our viewers. Let me flip that around and ask you what the last six months have been like for you personally.
Jacob Soboroff: Wow. You know, you know I live in L.A. and am from L.A. and it has been the craziest year. When I signed up for MSNBC exactly, literally exactly 10 years ago, August of 2015. I remember my boss at the time Phil Griffin said, you know, we want you to stay out in California, there’s a lot going on out there. And I think, you know, I was happy that I knew I was going to stay out in California, but I also was…probably had a little FOMO. I knew that our company was centered on the East Coast and, you know, the news world, which I was so excited to break into was, you know, largely East Coast centric.
But man, I’m so glad that I made that decision back then. Because of, specifically, what’s happened in 2025, you know, starting with January 7th and the fires that destroyed my hometown Pacific Palisades and Altadena and displaced tens of thousands of people and thousands and thousands of homes destroyed, you know, I’ve never experienced anything like that to go out on television and watch live, which I’m so fortunate to have done, been able to do, you know, particularly on your show. Let me just say this on the side, there is no other show on television where you will go on and you’ll get to be on television to tell a story for 30 minutes on live TV. You allow me to go do my thing.
Nicolle Wallace: No.
Jacob Soboroff: And one of those times, I was serious. One of those times was the fire, and there were several conversations that you and I had that, you know, how do you process in real time watching your hometown and your child at home carbonize in front of your own eyeballs? You can’t really is the answer to that question. And I was able to do it with you, and I’m so grateful to have been able to do that. And then, you know, this summer, these raids, these unprecedented raids that are modeled after this racist policy that the, Trump administration said very plainly, Dwight D. Eisenhower 1954 operation has torn apart the fabric of my community, but in a way, I feel more connected to it than ever before. So, I’m grateful for my family, grateful for my friends, grateful for my colleagues like you that we’ve all been able to go through all of this together. And it’s only, you know, we got a lot more of 2025 to go.
Nicolle Wallace: Well, you were fresh from a reporting trip in Manhattan at immigration court. And I found what was happening so gutting, and I feel like it is the biggest betrayal. I mean, I hate that people were waiving mass deportation signs at the Republican convention. I don’t know that all of them thought that the law-abiding process respecting asylum seekers and immigrants would be detained and disappeared in courthouses. I would doubt that very many of them thought that’s what they were signing up for.
Jacob Soboroff: Totally.
Nicolle Wallace: And I wonder what you think of seeing this policy that you helped shine a light on what they, the Trump voter wanted and then seeing what’s actually happening.
Jacob Soboroff: I’m not so sure that any of us actually. I mean, you know, what is mass deportation? I’ve said this to you on your broadcast over and over and over again for far more than six months, mass deportation is family separation by another name. But none of us knew actually what that was going to look like. Not me, who has covered this very closely over my 10 years here through Democratic and Republican administrations. But also, not the Trump supporters who, you know, I don’t know exactly what they thought they were going to be voting for. Those signs said mass deportation.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: Mass deportation means mass deportation. There aren’t enough, quote/unquote, “worse or the worst to fill up the mass deportation bucket,” so to speak. But I don’t think that even I knew what it would look like. And now we know, and I think a lot of people are starting to, I don’t want to call it buyer’s remorse, but I think it’s shocking the conscious, just like family separation did, just like that Republican appointed judge said in the Southern District of California in the summer of 2018, that ripping families apart shocks the conscience of anybody who sees what’s happening, violates due process, rips apart again, the fabric of our communities. And now we’re seeing it take place at Home Depots and at fruit carts and at flower stands and in the hallways of immigration court where people are trying to go and do the right thing. And I think, although I can’t say for sure, I think people are starting to really see this for what it is.
Nicolle Wallace: And what is it?
Jacob Soboroff: Cruelty? Intentional cruelty, just like Adam Serwer coined for The Atlantic. The cruelty is the point. And when we, you know, and I can’t thank you enough for your support of the film and we made “Separated,” Errol Morris and I, you know, I think that there were a lot of people who even counseled me when I would go out to talk about the project, you know, be careful in the way in which you describe sort of the nature of what happened. But the truth of the matter is it doesn’t matter what I think, just look at the objective facts around it. There are emails that stated very plainly.
One that comes to mind when reunifications are starting to happen during family separation, this undermines the whole effort, Jonathan White, the career civil servant for HHS, who was the center of the film, who tried everything he could have stopped the policy, said harm to children was the point. They knew this all along. And now here we are with the supersized version of it. And people are getting to see it and experience it themselves, especially residents of Southern California, and now people here in New York City. But this is, with the budget that was approved in this so-called Big, Beautiful Bill. This is coming to a city near you, and you’re going to get to experience it too, I say with a lot of regret and a lot of sadness.
Nicolle Wallace: It’s such an important point. And I remember when your film was done and you guys became on my show, but it wasn’t everywhere. It wasn’t wall to wall.
Jacob Soboroff: Right.
Nicolle Wallace: And I remember thinking that Trump would probably like it to be wall to wall that this was the disconnect, right, between earth one and earth two, that the cruelty was in the Trump administration’s view and Trump’s own telling, that was the deterrent. That was their strategy, right?
Jacob Soboroff: If only he could sort of stick to his guns about that, because it’s so interesting to see, I think, you know, I think you’re right. It’s why Katie Waldman, Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s now wife, invited me inside those facilities. They wanted us to see and for the world to see the cruelty that was being perpetrated upon innocent migrants, families, children, so that other people would turn around and be scared shitless and run away and not come to the country. But when hundreds of thousands of people came to the streets, millions of people came to the streets, the Pope spoke out. That ProPublica audio leaked by Ginger Thompson, where the border patrol agents were saying to crying children, oh, it sounds like we have an orchestra here, came out.
Nicolle Wallace: Babies.
Jacob Soboroff: Yes, babies. We all remember exactly where we were when that happened. He decided, he said, I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of the families being separated. He wasn’t saying I’m morally opposed to what’s going down. He’s saying, ah, this isn’t so good for me. And I think that there has already been a moment like that in this term, with these policies. You know, in the very early days of the L.A. raids, I was on your broadcast from a farm in Oxnard where they were literally chasing people through strawberry fields. And you could smell the strawberry sitting there rotting because workers were too scared to come to work. And right away he changed his mind and had reversed the policy.
But look who’s around him now, you know, this is Stephen Miller’s dream. And very soon after Donald Trump said, we’re going to take care of it. We’re going to take care of the farm workers, whatever, it was made clear again that these policies were going to move forward and they have, and they’ve continued to move forward. So I think it is what they want everybody to see. They want to scare people, but it’s almost like he can’t help himself when he realizes how bad it truly is. What Stephen Miller has basically convinced him to do, whether he fully understands what’s happening or not. He realizes that they are hurting people and that other people are noticing and are appalled by this behavior of the federal government.
Nicolle Wallace: Well, and they include Joe Rogan, who said, I didn’t sign up for this, doesn’t like that, as you’re talking about the images of people being rounded up. I think you did one of the first reports on television of people being rounded up at the Home Depot parking lot.
Jacob Soboroff: On your broadcast again.
Nicolle Wallace: On our show, yes.
Jacob Soboroff: Just a couple days after all of this started, it was Pablo Alvarado from National Day Laborer Organizing Network. They’re showing up at Home Depot Day labor centers, where people go and wait around for someone to come by and say, hey, can you help me out with the drywall at my house or put a piece of glass up by my shower, whatever, you know, everyday tasks. And they’re chasing after these people that are just looking to make a buck.
Nicolle Wallace: What is the disconnect in terms of the overwhelming number of people who say they want adjudicated criminals deported?
Jacob Soboroff: I think that people probably, I mean, this is just my personal feeling about it, play over in their head over and over again when Donald Trump said when he came down the golden escalator, rapist, murderers, criminals. It’s always been the first thing out of his mouth. Even Tom Homan today, I saw the border czar say, you know, we’re going after the worst elements, the criminals, but the data just doesn’t reflect that fact. Here’s the bottom line. The American people are being lied to by this administration about who they are going after and why and how. And all you got to do is open both of your eyes and watch television, listen to your broadcast, talk to anybody who might have any skin in the game whatsoever. And you realize that these are families, are fathers and daughters and mothers and sons. And all of it who are caught in the middle of this, not only and not primarily the worst of the worst. And that’s just an objective fact that you can actually see in the data. You don’t even have to see the personal stories, but the personal stories I think are what really hit home and are what are starting to resonate with people.
Nicolle Wallace: I spoke to Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach who are bearing witness in not a narrow way, but an important way in, for the children. They’re in court where children are being asked to defend themselves and answer questions. And they were horrified. And I hadn’t heard the stories they told before they told them. I mean, where is the organized sort of communication to the American people around what is happening or is it up to all of us to go find the truth?
Jacob Soboroff: I think it’s the latter. I don’t think we can rely on anybody actually to sort of give us that light bulb necessarily. And it’s why I encourage, I wear this little badge on my pants as my NBC News badge for people that are just listening and are not seeing it. It’s a pass to have x-ray vision about what’s going on in our society. And I would encourage every journalist right now, especially people in New York, to go down to 26 Federal Plaza and see the way that they’re treating people, even the families that are not being apprehended, but the mothers and fathers with their little babies who are going to check in an immigration court are walking through a gauntlet, like a physical gauntlet of masked, armed ICE agents who, whether or not it’s the intention are terrorizing these people in service of whatever this immigration policy is that’s being put forward by this administration. And there are every day.
You sent me the article this morning from the New York Times about the different organizations that are popping up in communities around the country to go see this with your own eyes, go stand on Home Depot parking lot if you live in Southern California, chances are you’re going to see federal agents roll by and take a look and see if anybody is there. And then think about how that makes you feel, think about how that connects to your everyday life. And maybe you’ll go about your day slightly differently. Maybe you’ll tell somebody a story about what you saw or what you heard or you’ll share a post. It’s really hard. Even my own siblings sometimes will say to me, hey, why don’t you post about this issue or that issue that’s going on around the globe? And my answer always is, I like to talk about what I’m able to see with my own eyes.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: Facts on the ground, the dip, which I’m sure very familiar with the military and diplomatic term. That’s how I operate. And when I have my own set of facts on the ground, I never feel more confident as a reporter or a person to be able to talk to people about what’s happening in our country. And so, I always tell people like, if you can do it, find a way to meet people who are affected by these types of policies. And don’t take my word for it. Learn for yourself.
Nicolle Wallace: I want to sort of platform the note, specifically about journalists, because I think it’s an important one. I mean, there are a lot of pressures bearing down on journalists, but from a place of sort of love and understanding of the mission, if as many people who went and sat in the courtroom when Donald Trump was on trial in New York —
Jacob Soboroff: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: — who went to Federal Plaza. Right. Explain.
Jacob Soboroff: Well, we had here at NBC at MSNBC, excuse me, every day I think we had a rotation. I wasn’t part of it because I live out in L.A., but almost every one of the primetime anchors, correspondents got the opportunity if they wanted to, to go down and sit and look at Donald Trump at Donald Trump’s criminal trial.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: And just to see what it looked like with their own eyes, what did he look like, what was the feeling in the room, what was the topic of conversation on that particular day. We should do that. We should do that with 26 Federal Plaza, because at 26 Federal Plaza every single day, and by the way, at other immigration courts inside of Manhattan as well, there are masked, armed federal agents standing around who are literally rendering people to a back secret room on the 10th floor who show up for their immigration hearings because they want to play by the rules. And it’s one thing to talk about it. It’s another thing to read about it. It’s another thing to see it on television. But when give this pass is a privilege and it allows you to be able to go and experience these things and sit with your own feelings and emotions yourself. I’m not somebody who runs away from my emotions on television and, in part, because of the way that you pulled them out of me. I remember during the fires, I was standing on a street corner and I said something, I think about what used to be here, here, and here down the block.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: And you kind of stopped me and said, wait a minute, tell me more. And you allowed me to access. It felt like a therapy session as someone —
Nicolle Wallace: I think it was a grocery store. Right?
Jacob Soboroff: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: And there was the —
Jacob Soboroff: And my pediatrician as well.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: And the veterinarian and the Chinese restaurant around the corner. It gives me the chill saying this because it all comes back, as someone who has a personal therapist and a couple’s therapist, I think my wife would be okay with me saying this, it was a bit of therapy on national television. And I think that we all, as reporters, should allow ourselves to access those emotions because we’re people too, we’re not Ron Burgundy’s, we’re not just showing up and reading what it says on the teleprompter in order to deliver you what somebody else wrote about what’s happening out there. And what a lucky guy I am to have the opportunity to go see and experience and experience these things myself and have colleagues like you, who allow me to communicate them to people who, and I mean, our audience, I care a lot about because they care about us. That’s the special thing about MSNBC actually.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: Is that this is a place where it actually isn’t about the politics. It’s about the people. And I mean that both directions, it’s about the connection that you and I have and our colleagues have, but it’s also about the connection and the trust that people place in us at a time when trust in media, I think is at all-time lows. And so, I want to use that trust responsibly and showing up in places like 26 Federal Plaza for me or anybody else that wants to go, I think is a good way to do that.
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Nicolle Wallace: We’re going to sneak in a quick break here. We’ll have much more with my friend and colleague journalist and author, Jacob Soboroff on the other side. Don’t go anywhere.
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Nicolle Wallace: I mean, you just articulated the whole thing, right. I mean, Rachel and I got it this a little bit when I had a chance to talk to her.
Jacob Soboroff: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: But in a lot of ways, since Trump won a second time, our jobs got easier because it’s clear what the mission is. Right?
Jacob Soboroff: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: And there’s a really successful effort on the right to mock the pain people feel when humans are dehumanized and when the cruelty, sort of maims the soul or the public conscience. They have operationalized this smear of, you know, snowflakes.
Jacob Soboroff: I was just going to say it.
Nicolle Wallace: Right, right. Yes. Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: You want to know who the snowflake is?
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: It’s the people who are tweeting at me because they’re uncomfortable with my reporting.
Nicolle Wallace: I get it too.
Jacob Soboroff: That’s a snowflake.
Nicolle Wallace: I get it too.
Jacob Soboroff: That’s a snowflake.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: A snowflake is not somebody who decides to go out and see something with their own eyes in order to communicate something from a vulnerable place when you know what kind of incoming you’re about to get.
Nicolle Wallace: For sure.
Jacob Soboroff: Snowflake is the person who sits behind their keyboard and will tweet some absolute bullshit at you. Excuse me.
Nicolle Wallace: Right.
Jacob Soboroff: About you’re just relaying what you saw with your own eyeballs.
Nicolle Wallace: Right. Right.
Jacob Soboroff: That’s a snowflake.
Nicolle Wallace: Exactly. But they’re so good at the public shaming of people who care that maybe someone innocent was swept up in a raid and sent to a third country or a terrorist prison. They’re so effective at the bullying of anyone in the arena with a conscience.
Jacob Soboroff: They love buzzy words, whether it’s, you know, illegals or aliens or in the case of the fires, news scum. I mean, they just want to say the thing they think is going to be shared or retweeted or get people fired up instead of get people thinking. By the way, the same can be true for people who watch us. I don’t want people just to take what I’m saying just because I’m saying it. Look into it on your own and you decide whether or not I’m telling you the truth about what I saw. That goes both ways. And so, the snowflake aspect of it, that just drives me crazy is when, it actually doesn’t drive me crazy anymore, it used to drive me crazy. I used to respond.
Nicolle Wallace: I like it now. I like it.
Jacob Soboroff: I feel like, do you still respond on social media that people are sending?
Nicolle Wallace: I quit. I quit X. And so, my problem is —
Jacob Soboroff: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: — I don’t even see it. I don’t even know anymore. I spent years wanting to win them over feeling like, —
Jacob Soboroff: Me too.
Nicolle Wallace: — if you knew me, you wouldn’t hate me this much. And then I realized a lot of the people tweeting at me were Russian bots and I thought, this is, and then I had a second kid and Trump won again and I was like, I don’t have the bandwidth for this. So, I started the podcast instead. I mean, it’s all connected, right? It’s our audience, I think, sees right through anything shallow or fake. I mean, I think this idea of broadcasting is so important for us, like the things that impact and the stories we’ve covered together, I think achieve this, the things that impact the broadest number of people. So, the tariffs and the truth is largely Trump won the people that were sort of undecided until the very end, they swung over to him in hopes of economic, either prosperity or relief from economic anxiety and the tariffs do nothing to —
Jacob Soboroff: Nope.
Nicolle Wallace: — quell that anxiety or lift them up economically. So, this story of the tariffs, which you’ve helped us cover, with things you can see with your own eyes. And when Trump says don’t believe your eyes, don’t believe your ears. It’s a piece of sound from 2017. He’s talking about tariffs.
Jacob Soboroff: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: He’s been obsessed with tariffs and people not believing their own economic experience for almost 10 years. But the piece about immigration, it requires the successful dehumanization in the mind of a majority or a large number of Americans, the people in the country illegally. I wonder what pieces of, you know, you sort of leave out of the stories when they’re so raw and there’s so much damage being done to families and humans and kids.
Jacob Soboroff: And the Barranco story, Alejandro Barranco and his father Narciso is a great example of that. I think one of the biggest blessings of this job and sort of the shittiest part of this job is that you meet people oftentimes in their absolute worst moment that they’ve ever had in their life. And that’s really hard because you have to make a choice about, you know, they’re not in a great place. And what do you share and what don’t you share? What do you share when it comes to showing those images of the parents and children walking through the hallways of armed masked, federal agents who are towering over them? You have to make a lot of decisions —
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: — that are really consequential that I just think about and second guess all the time. I look back at reporting that I did 10 years ago in 2018 during family separation about the way I approached sources and really, you know, at the end of the day, these are all, quote/unquote, “news stories,” but they’re really all stories about people in humanity. And I think that I’m no better equipped than anybody else to tell other people’s stories. If I could wave a magic wand, I used to say this about “Separated,” I would like the Shoah Foundation allow all 5,500 children and their parents that were deliberately taken and tortured, in the words of Physicians for Human Rights, to tell their stories in their own time and in their own way. But that’s not how our modern media ecosystem is set up. And so, you just try to do the best that you can, and I think I struggle with that a lot. Am I doing the best job that I can? I try to think about what I would do in the context of my own family. I think about them a lot and I think about the people who I cross paths with a lot. I frequently think back to whether or not we’re representing people in the way that they would want to. And I think we are, and I hope we are, but it’s a big responsibility to sit with every day.
Nicolle Wallace: I mean, you have little, little kids.
Jacob Soboroff: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: How much are they aware of the stories you cover?
Jacob Soboroff: I think that they’re aware that there are things going on that are sort of bigger than all of us and that I am doing my best to tell those stories by going out and seeing them. I’m not so sure as a 9-year-old, you know, he knows about family separation. He’s asked me if he could read the book or see the movie. But I told him not yet, you know.
Nicolle Wallace: Too much.
Jacob Soboroff: It is. It’s a lot, but I also think that I’m happy that they know that I’m able to get to go to all these places and see all these things and experience it all. And that’s what I try to communicate to them. It’s important to be out there and to have a life outside of our own and to understand other people that don’t do or see or experience what we do every day.
Nicolle Wallace: I wonder if you can sort of take me through your reporting.
Jacob Soboroff: I think the story that has stuck with me throughout this, you know, this mass deportation effort the most, and it all came about by happenstance is the Barranco family, Alejandro and Narciso Barranco. Narciso is the father of three Marines, two active duty at Camp Pendleton and one a Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan, Alejandro. And when that video of him being taken down violently by those masked armed federal agents went viral.
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Unknown: Leave him alone, bro.
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Jacob Soboroff: I think you and I exchanged a text and I tried to find Alejandro when he agreed to come on your show. I think it’s one of the most sort of profound and moving and shocking, actually, interviews that I’ve ever been a part of because these guys constantly went against my expectations. Just to reset the story, after he was apprehended and beaten by these agents, he was locked up at the metropolitan detention center in downtown L.A. He said, through his son, there were 70 other people in there. The conditions were awful. He stayed in the clothes that had the blood on them. He still had pepper spray in his eyes. He didn’t get to take a shower. He barely had any food or drink. And then he was moved to Adelanto, the ICE detention center in the high desert, outside of Los Angeles, where I went during family separation. I’ll never forget seeing people curled up in the fetal position and isolation. It was shut down during COVID because the conditions were so awful.
A federal judge shut it down and said, you cannot detain anybody else there. So, they moved him there. And after I think about three weeks in detention, he was released on $3,000 bond which, by the way, since then the Trump administration has said, we’re not releasing anybody else on bond who’s swept up in this mass deportation effort. He went home, he went home to Santa Ana, California, and was reunited with his family. And they very graciously invited me to come over and to meet both of them. And I want to play some sound for you, but I also just want to say before I do that again, what an unbelievable privilege to be invited in their home to see, you know, this man who’s a landscaper and takes such pride in his work, to show me around his garden, to show me his orange tree to show me the succulent plants that he was so proud of that had grown from little seedlings into these big, beautiful things.
You’ll hear when I play some of the audio that we talked in Spanish, he spoke in Spanish and we have a translation, but when he’s spoke in his garden, he spoke to me in English because he felt comfortable and proud. And it wasn’t about the hurt or the hate that he feels like he has felt going through this experience. He doesn’t know whether he and I is going to come back, or be allowed to stay in the country, even though he raised three boys to be proud of this country. Maybe that’s where I should start.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: To play a little sound from you. I asked him about what he thought about the future and where he thought we would go from here. And here’s a little bit of what he told me. Let’s listen.
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Jacob Soboroff: Are you able to think about the future?
Narciso Barranco: (through translator) After what I’d just been through, we need to live for today, just today. Tomorrow, we don’t know.
Jacob Soboroff: If you could have a message, any message to President Trump, what would that message be?
Narciso Barranco: (through translator) The only thing I would tell him is that, as human beings, as people, we have an opportunity. And if there is something to offend the families just don’t separate the families. That’s the only thing.
Jacob Soboroff: Don’t separate families. It seems like a simple message, but it’s not what’s happening. My last question for you is this, you have become, I think, a symbol for so many people across the country and across the world of what they see as the injustice of what’s happening all across the United States, and your son, a hero. What does that mean to you?
Narciso Barranco: (through translator) As I’ve said, I am proud of my sons. On that side, I’m very proud of them. But as for myself, my own value, the humiliation, it’s sad because there was something that was left on the floor and they lifted it up with head up high. And there’s something very special here. The unity came from the entire town, the communication, the people, because it’s true my son is a hero. But the actual hero is a community and one is nothing without community and support.
(End VT)
Nicolle Wallace: It’s so incredible. I mean, for you as the storyteller here to have this story begin and end with family separation just gives me chills.
Jacob Soboroff: I was saying to you that you never failed to be or feel surprised by this type of stuff. And what he said there, there’s something very special here. Who would say that after going through what he went through?
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: A man like that, you know, a man who raised three sons to be proud of this country to join it and to fight for it, to put their lives on the line. And then the country treats him that way. He still says, there’s something very special here. He says, he said something else. If I could play it for you, too Nicolle.
Nicolle Wallace: Please.
Jacob Soboroff: About what it was like, and it speaks to the character of this man, Mr. Barranco, what it was like inside of Adelanto, one of the worst by reputation, detention centers in the whole ICE system. And there’s a lot to be concerned about. He said at a press conference when he spoke to the public, he didn’t take any questions, but he said that he still had hope, there was hope still inside. And I didn’t understand that. How is it possible? And that’s what I asked him about. So, here’s what he said about that.
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Jacob Soboroff: Today I heard you describing being locked up in Adelanto, even in a place like that there’s still hope. Why did you say that? Why do you feel that way?
Narciso Barranco: (through translator) Put yourself in my place, what will you feel? Of course, I’m a human being and they don’t want me to be here outside. I’m with the people on the inside because they’re my people, people I lived with. And I had hope, as I would always tell them, one day we’re going to get out, having faith and we haven’t done anything bad. It’s just simply for working. And I see my reflection in their pain because it’s my own.
(End VT)
Nicolle Wallace: It’s incredible.
Jacob Soboroff: Yes. There’s a man thinking about everybody he left behind inside that place and not about himself. Talk about selfless. And even in the face of, as he said, a future that’s uncertain. He doesn’t know where he’s going to go or where he’s going to end up, if he’s going to have to go back to Mexico, a place he hasn’t been to for 30 years, that his sons have never lived. But he’s thinking about other people. I mean, he named by name other people who were inside ICE detention when we talked. People who have little children, that particular challenges that their children face specifically, you don’t just go in there. You know, I think a lot of people think based on the way that the president talks, people are going in there and it’s a bunch of gang bangers or the hardened worst of the worst. And it’s fathers like Narciso Barranco.
Nicolle Wallace: Who raised three sons to serve in the United States military. I mean, you couldn’t make it up. We will be right back with more of my conversation with Jacob Soboroff. Stick around.
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Nicolle Wallace: I mean, that is the face of people who may have come here illegally decades and decades ago, but he raised his kids to love this country so much. And all three of his sons served.
Jacob Soboroff: Not just the country but work, to actually dedicate yourself to something. You know, he didn’t say you have to go to the Marines. He led by example, as a landscaper. He was telling me when I was at his house, he said, look at that tree up there. Before, I was a landscaper, very proud to say this. He said, you know, with clients like that IHOP or whatever, I would climb up palm trees like that one and cut tree branches. And the smile, the wattage smile on his face when we went from doing just the awful, terrible, sad business of counting the things that he went through to talking about how proud he was just to have to be gainfully employed and to have a job, even if that meant climbing up in a tree and risking his own life that he could fall out. God, he was proud.
That’s the last clip I want to play for you actually is that, I asked him about why it was so important to him. Alejandro told you and I both, that he was going to go take over for his dad when his dad was locked up, to go and service his landscaping clients. And I wonder why that was such a big deal for him and for Narciso, who had asked him to do that when they talked, when he was locked up. So, I asked him about that. Here’s his answer to that.
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Jacob Soboroff: After one of the first conversations after you were taken by the agents, one of the first things that your dad asked you to do was to keep doing his job for him.
Alejandro Barranco: Yes. Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: Why did you ask him that after you got detained, why was it so important for you to ask Alejandro to keep doing the work?
Narciso Barranco: (through translator) First of all, responsibilities. I think that it was dignified one, in which I was able to bring home something to eat in support of my household.
Jacob Soboroff: He told me you’re a person who loves this country and you taught your boys to love this country. And your three boys joined the United States Marines. Why did you teach them to love this country so much?
Narciso Barranco: (through translator) Because for us Hispanics, it’s a land of opportunity, but simply I’ve always told them you want to be someone in life, watch your record, protect yourself. If you want to be good, you’ll be good. And if you don’t want to be good, then you can just throw your life away. It’s different. It’s just, as this country can give us an opportunity. It can also destroy many of us.
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Jacob Soboroff: That’s it? Right?
Nicolle Wallace: Oh, my God.
Jacob Soboroff: Like that’s the central. That is the Narciso Barranco story.
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: Is that just as this country can give us opportunity and give opportunity to his three American citizen boys, Alejandro going to Afghanistan to protect all of us, his other two ready to go at any minute. It can also destroy many of us. And he’s going through that after raising these three wonderful boys. And I think that that’s so amazingly encapsulates the moment that we’re in, what direction do we want to go? And do we want it to be a country of opportunity? Do we want it to be a country that can destroy so many of us who are giving back? And is there any better? We talked before about representing people well and allowing them to speak for themselves. I’m so glad he decided to talk because he was very nervous, but I am so glad that he shared that message. And I’m not the one that needs to relay it or paraphrase. So, you heard it from him. That’s a decision we have to make as a people, as reporters, as neighbors, which direction do we want to go in right now? And thank goodness for Narciso and Alejandro and their family for sort of walking us through this moment and allowing us to think about it like that.
Nicolle Wallace: Do you ever allow yourself to think about what four years of this will be like how many Narciso lives will be ruined?
Jacob Soboroff: Oh, yes. I think every day there’s a Narciso. For every Narciso that we see, there’s probably orders of magnitude more behind the scenes that we don’t know about. It’s why it’s so important, by the way, for everybody to pick up their phones, if they see something like this happening and record and show what’s happening out on the streets, because that’s the only way that we know. We only know about Narciso because I follow on Instagram called the Santanero, which is an Orange County citizen journalism outfit. And why I’ve been trying to repost as many of those videos as I can when I see them coming through. It’s heavy to think about that this could go on and on and on, but the heartening side of it is they’re all human stories as well. And so, often when we talk about immigration, we’re talking about points on a bar graph or, you know, whatever, extrapolating data, but every one of these stories is a human story. And that’s what I just keep trying to think about because it gets overwhelming when you think about it like the numbers or when we talk about immigration, like the weather that it’s a flow —
Nicolle Wallace: Yes.
Jacob Soboroff: — or a flood or an inundation or a surge. No, it’s not. These are all different humans with different stories and we’re at not for whatever you want to think, the grace of God or luck or whatever, it could be you or I in their position and someone else trying to do their best to tell our story.
Nicolle Wallace: What should it look like? Like what, everyone talks about a broken immigration system. Donald Trump seems hell bent on beating former President Obama’s numbers. I mean, to your point, the whole debate is so perverted that I don’t even know what anyone knows what a sane, humane immigration policy would look like. Like, do you know what that looks like?
Jacob Soboroff: Well, you know, I always say I’m not a policy maker, but what I can tell you is what I have learned is that through decades of bipartisan deterrence-based, punitive-based immigration policy, America has not changed anything. People still come to this country, even though Donald Trump would say today, well, the numbers are as low as they’ve ever been and nobody is coming. I promise you they’ll come again. Because people are always going to flee violence and persecution and political instability and climate change. You name it. Right now, when we’re talking, millions of people are on the move, whatever hemisphere, country, part of the globe that we’re talking about. And what I can say for sure, even only after covering this for 10 or 11 years, is that harming people doesn’t stop people from coming. And Joe Biden promised a fair, safe, humane, orderly system, and did not deliver that actually. You know, he leaned into, in the face of political pressure, some of the same restrictive type of policies.
It was Stephen Colbert who actually said to me, talk about somebody who wears their heart on their sleeve, that the president with the most courage in terms of immigration, certainly in my lifetime, in most of ours is Ronald Reagan who granted amnesty. And I’m not saying amnesty is the solution, but he made a decision at that time, people who had been in the country for a particular amount of time and who have met certain criteria for giving back should have the opportunity to stay here. And the conversation is so far away from recognizing the contributions of people who are already here or who are coming here that I worry that I won’t be able to get back there, but that’s where I would like the conversation to go. I don’t know where the policy goes, but I know that we’re not talking about humans right now. We’re talking about we’re graphs and charts and records and what president can claim the title of the most deportations ever.
Nicolle Wallace: But to your point, that’s all wrapped in a nine-year long and actually it probably predates Trump in the escalator, he just turbocharged it. It’s predicated on the dehumanization of people here illegally.
Jacob Soboroff: Yes.
Nicolle Wallace: Because the history, you know, this story about, we’re all immigrants, we’re all from somewhere else. I mean, you know, everybody has an immigration story. How much of this is braided with racism?
Jacob Soboroff: Oh, so much of it. I mean, Errol Morris would say when we made “Separated” that family separation was a policy based on meanness. And I think that he’s right. I think that so much of U.S. immigration policy is based on meanness on a certain level of generality and racism. More specifically, when I reported on your broadcast from Ukraine and I came back from Ukraine and I went to the border in Tijuana and I watched them open the border for tens of thousands of white Ukrainians to enter the country and bypass extraordinarily long lines of black and brown and Asian people who have been waiting on the other side of the border and people from other places all over the world for year, for months, if not years. And why did they do that? You have to ask the people that opened the doors, this and this was the Biden administration, opened the doors to those refugees and not everyone else who has been sitting there. And then I went to Haiti and watched as the Biden administration deported more Haitians than anybody ever had back to, for sure, despair, worst case death going back to that country after the assassination of the president, but they did it anyway. And so, yes, I’m making a call, you know. I’m not saying largely and entirely based on who these people are, where they come from and what they look like, but it’s hard not to draw those connections when you stand at the border and watch —
Nicolle Wallace: You see it.
Jacob Soboroff: — all these people walk in. And yet a whole another class of people from another place is made to sit there and wait.
Nicolle Wallace: When people ask you, how do you do this work every day? How do you answer them? What do you say?
Jacob Soboroff: I work with people I love. I work with people I love and I’m surrounded by people I love. And that’s the only way to do this. You have to find a way to balance all of this with your life at home. And to be honest with you, I’m not the best at it. And you’re going to make me cry. It’s not easy. You see a lot of crazy, gnarly stuff. And when you go home and you realize what you have, you know, it just makes you recognize the weight of what we all experience every day and what we talk about every day. And I just feel lucky. I feel lucky to have what I have professionally and personally, and sometimes, you know, it isn’t easy. But that’s why I love it because I feel really supported by people like you and people like, like mine, Nicolle, and my kids and everybody we work with and the people that are out there listening to us right now and watching us. They’re, I think, all of those people, all of you are how, you know, we all get through dealing with some really heavy stuff on a daily basis.
Nicolle Wallace: It all feels precious. I mean, the country is in such a radical moment that you don’t take anything for granted.
Jacob Soboroff: We can’t let our guard down whatever we’re doing or wherever we’re at. And that’s why I love coming on with you, Nicolle, because you keep me on my toes and you give us this platform. It’s the best.
Nicolle Wallace: No, you’re the best. You’re the best. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for the interview. Thanks for all the appearances and thanks for keeping us on us.
Jacob Soboroff: Thank you for everything always. You’re the best. Thank you.
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Nicolle Wallace: Thank you so much for listening to The Best People. Be sure to subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts to get this and other MSNBC podcasts ad free. As a subscriber, you also get early access and exclusive bonus content.
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The Best People is produced by Vicki Vergolina, Max Jacobs, and senior producer, Lisa Ferri with additional support from Delia Hayes and Colette Holcomb. Our audio engineer is Bob Mallory and Bryson Barnes is the head of audio production. Pat Burkey is the executive producer of Deadline White House. Brad Gold is the executive producer of content strategy. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of audio and Madeleine Haeringer is senior V.P. in charge of audio, digital and longform.
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