(KGTV) - The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Friday against the Trump Administration for "forcibly separating asylum-seeking parents and young children."

“Whether or not the Trump administration wants to call this a ‘policy,’ it certainly is engaged in a widespread practice of tearing children away from their parents" Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said. "A national class-action lawsuit is appropriate because this is a national practice.”

The national class-action lawsuit expands an existing ACLU case regarding an asylum-seeking mother and her 7-year-old daughter who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo and were separated and detained in the U.S. afterward.

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The ACLU said they are concerned over reports that the Trump Administration was considering policies aimed at separating parents from children "as a way to scare others from seeking refuge in the U.S."

The suit wants a federal judge to deem family separation unlawful.

A migrant rights advocate found more than 400 cases of parent-child separation since January 2017.