After a bitterly contested Supreme Court justice confirmation, a midterm election, the release of the Mueller Report, presidential impeachment proceedings, a global pandemic, and a mass uprising for policing reform, the heart-wrenching human rights crisis that unfolded on the southern U.S. border in the spring and summer of 2018 may seem a distant memory to those who did not directly live through it. In Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff mines his memories of the forced separation of immigrant children from their families in order to freshen our own, documenting one of the most shameful chapters in modern American history.

The book takes the form of a reporter’s memoir, and operates on one level as a chronicle of how 21st-century journalism works. Soboroff recounts how his coverage of immigration issues that year gradually came to focus on the Trump administration’s policy of family separation, admitting that early in 2018, he was unaware of the issue. Eventually, he would be among the first reporters allowed inside immigrant detention centers in Texas. There, he witnessed firsthand the appalling conditions—overcrowded bunk rooms, chain-link enclosures filled with asylum seekers wrapped in silver mylar blankets—that would bring his reporting international attention. He was among the first observers to call those enclosures “cages.” Despite the protests of at least one high-ranking Border Patrol official and other apologists for the separation policy, he stands by the description.

But Soboroff does not hold himself forth as any kind of journalistic hero. He gives full credit to other reporters, such as the Houston Chronicle’s Lomi Kriel and the New York Times’ Caitlin Dickerson, for breaking the family separation story, providing him leads to follow. He admits errors in his reporting and confesses that the horror he felt about the situation led him to offer characterizations that many would consider breaches of journalistic objectivity. The book’s personal frame, including Soboroff imagining being separated from his own young son, serves as a reminder that journalists are only human.

“What started as an exploration of realities of life along both sides of the border became, for me, a lesson in how thirty years of failed border policy led to the present moment, wherein thousands of young children, under the guise of ‘deterrence,’ were likely to be permanently traumatized in the pursuit of a political goal. And understanding how separated I was from the realities of bipartisan American border policy was a lesson I learned belatedly, as a journalist and a citizen,” Soboroff writes.