Trump administration separated thousands more migrants than previously known

The Trump administration separated thousands more migrant kids at the border than it previously acknowledged, and the separations began months before the policy was announced, according to a federal audit released Thursday morning.

“More children over a longer period of time” were separated at the border than commonly known, an investigator with the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general told reporters Thursday morning. “How many more children were separated is unknown, by us and HHS.”

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The report sheds new light on the Trump administration’s controversial efforts to deter border crossings by separating migrant families. House Democrats who’ve condemned the separations as inhumane have vowed to investigate the administration’s handling of the policy and its health effects on separated children.

The first separations began in 2017 and were seen as a trial balloon for the “zero-tolerance” policy announced by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in May 2018, an HHS official told POLITICO.

The Department of Homeland Security and HHS, which was responsible for the care of the separated children, last summer faced a June 2018 court order to reunify about 2,500 separated children who were in custody with their families. Most of those families were reunited within 30 days.

However, “thousands of separated children” entered the care of the HHS refugee office before the court order, the report said. The reunification rate for those children is not known, the inspector general’s office said.

The report also found that the Trump administration failed to track separated families in a single database — an administrative decision that complicated efforts to reunify the families. The border patrol kept relevant family data in more than 60 different datasets, investigators found, confirming details a former HHS official first provided on POLITICO’s “Pulse Check” podcast last week.

The report also found that the administration repeatedly revised its count of separated children last year. The Trump administration in June 2018 publicly reported there were 2,053 separated children in HHS custody, and the number steadily rose to 2,668 by October 2018, when the administration acknowledged it lost track of some children for months.

Immigration rights groups have long faulted the administration for undercounting the number of separated children. An Amnesty International report in October 2018 concluded that about 8,000 “family units” — a term inconsistently applied by the border patrol to individuals as well as families — were separated at the border across 2017 and 2018.