Amna Nawaz:

Partly.

I mean, look, over the last six years, the numbers of unaccompanied children have been going up. There was a huge spike after 2012. Last year, though, in fiscal year 2017, they went down.

And since then, people who look at the numbers say they have kind of stayed steady. And that's largely because the things that people are fleeing, the kids are fleeing in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the violence and uncertainty, those really haven't changed.

So there's two other things that offer some insight into what's really going on here. One is the discharge rate. The documents we saw show that has gone down, meaning they're moving kids out of the system much more slowly. At the same time, the average length of stay, that's gone up.

There's some other numbers I want to take a look at here. So two years ago, the average child was staying in U.S. custody 40 days. Now they're staying an average of 50 — sorry — in 2017, it was 51 days. That has now gone up to 59 days in custody.

So we asked some former government officials about what's going on here. They point to Trump administration policies. There were two new policies that went into effect, one which they said, look, anyone who's in the household that wants to get a child back in their custody, everyone has to submit data and fingerprinting.

That can take a long time. They also said all this information is going to be going to ICE for enforcement purposes. So it had a chilling effect. People are less likely to come forward.