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. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Immigration Trump administration separated thousands more migrants than previously known, federal watchdog says

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's office told reporters Thursday morning. "How many more children were separated is unknown, by us and HHS" because of failures to track families as they were being separated, she said.


HHS officials involved in caring for the separated children and reunifying families estimated "thousands" of additional children are separated at the border, the inspector general said.

The report sheds new light on the Trump administration’s 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, and the inspector general said additional investigations are in the works.

"America can have border security without bullying and we can be safe without treating toddlers as terrorists," Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote on Twitter as he again urged Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to resign over the policy.

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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 not involved in conducting the audit told POLITICO. A federal investigator declined to say whether senior Trump administration officials were told about those early separations, but suggested that could be addressed in the upcoming reports.

"We did not, in this report, address who knew what, when," said Assistant Inspector General Ann Maxwell on the press call.

The inspector general report said some family separations continued, even after President Donald Trump in June 2018 ended the policy amid uproar and a federal court ordered his administration to reunify the families. The June 2018 court order called on the administration to reunify about 2,500 separated children in government custody. Most of those families were reunited within 30 days.

However, HHS received at least 118 separated children between July and early November, according to the report. DHS provided "limited" information about the reason for those separations. In slightly more than half of those cases, border officials cited the parent's criminal history as a reason to separate the families, although they did not always provide details. The court order requiring reunifications said family separations should only occur if border officials could specify when parents posed possible dangers to children or were otherwise unfit to care for them, the inspector general noted.

Federal investigators said they had no details about how many of the "thousands of separated children" who entered the care of HHS before the June 2018 court order had been reunited.

"We have no information about the status of the children who were released prior to the court order," Maxwell told reporters.

The report found that the Trump administration failed to track separated families in a single database, complicating 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 inspector general's office said it is planning additional reports that will investigate how the children were housed, who cared for them, the effects on the children's health and the administration's approach to reunifying families.

"This is the first of many reports that we anticipate on this topic," Maxwell said.

HHS, which wasn't involved in formulating the separation policy, said it largely agreed with the findings as it defended its work to reunify families and touted its new procedures to identify separated children at the border.

"To help ensure that all potentially separated children are identified promptly, [the refugee office] has modified its case management process," Lynn Johnson, the assistant secretary for children and families, wrote in a response to the inspector general.

Katie Waldman, a DHS spokesperson, defended the department's handling of the separations and attacked the independent auditor's report, claiming that border patrol policies were consistent with the previous administration's. "For the HHS [inspector general] to claim it was not known that DHS is actively enforcing this policy in the same manner for more than a decade ... casts doubt on the HHS [inspector general's] credibility on this topic," Waldman said in a statement.

However, DHS for months offered shifting explanations about its separation efforts, and Nielsen denied the zero-tolerance policy even existed just three days before Trump signed an executive order to end it. An administration official told POLITICO that the department's border patrol agents failed to document whether most deported migrants were asked if they wanted to leave their children behind, raising questions about whether DHS intended to reunite the families.

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 2,737 in the latest count, as more data was collected. For instance, the administration in October 2018 acknowledged that a miscount had left at least 14 migrant children stranded in custody 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.

