The Trump administration appears to have lied about the number of migrant children it had separated at the border, despite months of focus on the atrocity by news organizations and activists around the world.

According to a Thursday report by The Intercept, the Trump administration “carried out thousands more family separations than previously acknowledged.” The government’s own data, the reporters say, “indicates that the campaign was far more expansive — and far more destructive — than previously acknowledged.”

Americans are used to hearing that about 2500 children were separated from their parents. That number is substantially larger.

From April 19, 2018 to August 15, 2018 – just under four months – U.S. Customs and Border Protection numbers say 6022 “family units,” which CBP refuses to define, were separated. A family unit could be one person in a family, or several members of a family, or an entire family. CBP will not say, The Intercept reports.

But it’s even worse.

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“Using available statistics from the last two years,” Amnesty International also “reports that in 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration appears to have separated approximately 8,000 ‘family units’ along the border. Even if half of the people referred to in that figure were parents, the remaining 4,000 children would dwarf the total number of kids commonly reported to have been impacted by the “zero tolerance” campaign — that total tends to hover between 2,500 to 3,000.”

But the worst can be suspected.

“The closest Amnesty [International] could get to a clarification on the ‘family unit’ question,” the reports author sad, “was a claim from CBP that the 6,022 figure ‘appeared’ to refer to individuals.”

4000 is about 60 percent more than the 2500 generally reported. 6022 is far more than twice what Americans were told. 8000 is close to triple.

Alt-right hero Stephen Miller, a Senior Advisor to the President and the person responsible for crafting the child separation policy, early on said it was a “simple decision” to implement ripping children, some as young as two, apart from their parents.

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The Dept. of Health and Human Services is tasked with housing all the migrant children separated from their undocumented parents as part of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. That policy may have permanently separated families – it’s been revealed there was never any plan to reunite the children with their parents and siblings, and now the feds are scrambling under court orders.

While the Health and Human Services Dept., headed by Secretary Alex Azar – a former big pharmaceuticals executive – showed exactly zero planning after Trump implemented his zero tolerance policy, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of HHS, has acted on a disturbing premise, and shown exactly where its priorities lie.

In what Slate is describing as a “budgeting exercise,” Secretary Azar’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is planning for a surge in migrant children being separated from their parents. The ORR has a plan to house 25,400 migrant children by the end of the year. And it is paying for the program by gutting another: The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, according to internal Office of Refugee Resettlement documents.

“The documents,” Slate reports, “indicate that HHS plans to pay for child separation by reallocating money from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which, according to its website, ‘provides a comprehensive system of care that includes primary medical care and essential support services for people living with HIV who are uninsured or underinsured.’ Per the documents, the process of transferring those HIV/AIDS funds has already begun.”

HHS will also ask Congress for additional funds, and “plans to reallocate $79 million from programs for refugee resettlement, a move that could imperil social services, medical assistance, and English language instructions for refugees in the U.S., as well as programs for torture survivors.”

ORR says it will need $1.3 billion more to house migrant children, to cover the last three months of the year – that’s the entire amount allocated for all of 2018.

The Trump administration promised that it knew where all the children who were separated from their undocumented parents under its “zero tolerance” policy of splitting kids from their parents were. A federal judge ordered all migrant children separated at the Southern border be reunited with their parents and families, and gave the administration until Tuesday to reunite children five years and younger with their parents.

According to Talking Points Memo, the administration has successfully reunited just two children under five with their parents. It is not expected to meet Tuesday’s deadline.

“Southern District of California Judge Dana Sabraw held off on giving them an extension, and is instead demanding that they come back to court on Tuesday to explain how many families were reunited, why the government failed to reunite the rest by the deadline, and how much more time it will need for those cases,” TPM’s Alice Ollstein reports.

Justice Department attorney Sarah Fabien says she believes the administration will be able to reunite barely more than half of those the court had ordered returned to their parents, by the deadline. That would be just 56 in total, out of 102.

The ACLU has offered to help the government in its search for the parents of the children stolen from their parents.

Somewhere between 9 and 19 parents of children 5 or younger have already been deported.