A federal audit reveals the Trump administration separated thousands more families and children than it has previously acknowledged.
“More children over a longer period of time” were separated at the border than previously revealed, a DHS Inspector General investigator told reporters Thursday, Politico reports. “How many more children were separated is unknown, by us and HHS.”
The report finds that the Trump administration began separating children from their parents and from their own siblings in 2017, before the “zero-tolerance” policy, started under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, was publicly announced in 2018. Those separations were made as a “trial balloon.”
The report states that the “total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown,” and “HHS has thus far identified 2,737 children in its care at that time who were separated from their parents. However, thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the Court, and HHS has faced challenges in identifying separated children.”
In June of 2018 a court ordered the Dept. of Health and Human Services to reunite about 2500 children with their families, but that number did not include the 2017 separations.
Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has claimed there is no policy of separating children.
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