Donald Trump's family-separation policy may have ended in theory, but in practice there's little way forward for the children thrown in cages and the families they were pulled away from. The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to detain thousands more families, and immigration officials are eagerly using separated children as collateral to push asylum seekers to agree to deportation. But the one thing missing from the equation is an actual system for reuniting those families.

Now the government has to come up with a system quickly. On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration is required to reunite families within 30 days, at a maximum. Per the Associated Press:

If children are younger than 5, they must be reunified within 14 days of the order issued Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego. Sabraw, an appointee of President George W. Bush, also issued a nationwide injunction on future family separations, unless the parent is deemed unfit or doesn’t want to be with the child. He also requires the government provide phone contact between parents and their children within 10 days.

The U.S. government does claim to have a system in place. In fact, they have a database designed to track all separated children and their parents, which would be a tremendous resource. Unfortunately, there's no evidence it exists. As BuzzFeed reports, immigration activists and lawyers say they've seen no proof that the government actually has such a database, and that it's not clear if they're really just in the process of developing one. And BuzzFeed didn't fare any better in verifying it:

But neither [Health and Human Services nor Homeland Security] was willing or able to describe that database, explain when it was created, or say how the information in it was obtained. A spokesperson for DHS declined to comment on the record and referred the question to HHS. A spokesperson for HHS directed BuzzFeed News to its Administration for Children and Families division. After repeated questions, an ACF spokesperson said she “did not have all the information readily available.”

This is far from a conspiracy theory. The Trump administration lies about large and small issues on a regular basis, and even Kirstjen Nielsen, DHS secretary and allegedly one of the few members of the cabinet with principles, has tried to mislead the public and the press about family separation. But Leah Chavla, a policy adviser for Women's Refugee Commission, told BuzzFeed that even if the database exists, it's not enough: “We're not aware of any database. What we are seeing, what's clear to us, is that CBP [Customs and Border Protection], ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement], and ICE are not really sharing information in any real, meaningful, comprehensive way for the purposes of reunification.”

Separated kids have been sent far from the border detention facilities, with some already arriving at shelters in New York. And it goes without saying that trying to retroactively track these detentions and separations is a monumental task. And the Trump administration has shown that they're only willing and able to break things, not put them back together.