President Trump’s practice of taking migrant children from their parents was far more widespread than previously thought, a bombshell new audit revealed Thursday.
The report — released by the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — didn’t attempt to put an exact number on how many children are still unaccounted for, but estimates “thousands” more may have been separated from their families before the federal government officially rolled out its policy.
The notorious “zero tolerance” policy formally began in the spring of 2018, but actually started ramping up nearly a year before in 2017, the audit shows.
As a result, thousands more children may have been separated and referred to the agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“Prior to the formal announcement of the zero-tolerance policy, ORR staff and officials observed a steep increase in the number of children who had been separated from a parent or guardian,” the report notes.
In April 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled the Trump administration’s new hard-line approach to the southern border, which included referring all undocumented immigrants for criminal prosecution. That, in turn, led to a dramatic increase in children being separated from their families.
Two months later, in June, a federal judge ordered the administration end the separations and reunite families who met certain criteria. The administration identified approximately 2,700 kids taken from their caregivers who fell within those criteria.
But the court order did not include all the children.
“The Court did not require HHS to determine the number, identity, or status of an estimated thousands of children whom DHS separated during an influx that began in 2017,” the report notes.
“We don’t have any information on those children who were released prior to the court order,” an investigator with the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general told reporters Thursday. “How many children were separated is unknown, by us and HHS.”
Despite what the report described as “considerable” efforts to locate each child placed in its care, Health and Human Services officials continued to find still-separated children as many as five months after the reunification order. How many of them were released to family members or sponsors remains unclear.
The report notes that the agency often struggled with keeping accurate and easy to access records, that it was woefully ill-prepared for the Trump separation policy from the outset and lacked a reliable “integrated data system” to keep track of children, some of whom were infants.
“The report reveals that the government had a policy of systematically separating immigrant children from their parents far in advance of the official zero-tolerance policy,” said the American Immigration Council in a written statement. “And it shows the absence of any meaningful, centralized system in place to track these separated families.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said it “shocks the conscience and confirms our worst fears.”
“Next month, the Judiciary Committee will be conducting oversight over the entirety of the administration’s cruel and inhumane family separation policy,” he said.
With News Wire Services
