Leer en español How You Can Help If you know of families who’ve been affected, fill out this questionnaire. If you know something about a detention facility, fill out this questionnaire. To contact Intercept reporters covering family separation, write to Ryan Devereaux, Alice Speri, and Cora Currier. To contact us on WhatsApp or Signal, send a message to 917-478-6297. For more than a year, top officials in the Trump administration threatened to prosecute parents caught crossing the southwest border illegally and separate them from their children in the process. The aim was deterrence. The government tested the enforcement measure in pockets along the U.S.-Mexico divide throughout the second half of 2017. Then, on April 6, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the tactic a border-wide reality, calling for a program of “zero tolerance.” By that point, the number of family separations that had already taken place was well into the hundreds. There would be thousands more in the weeks that followed. Babies, toddlers, and asylum-seekers were all swept up in the crackdown. A recent injunction from a federal judge ordered the government to begin reunifying the families it has separated, but questions remain: Can the government do it? Will it? And who are these children? Where are they? And where are their parents? As armies of attorneys descend on the border to confront the crisis created by the Trump administration, news organizations ProPublica, BuzzFeed News, The Intercept, Univision News, Animal Político, Plaza Pública, and El Faro are partnering to gather vital information about the children in immigration detention facilities and shelters.

The government has provided varying counts of the total number of families it has separated. Overlapping timelines make a precise figure difficult to pin down. Recently, the government has claimed that 2,047 children taken from their parents after the order officially went into effect remain separated. But counts that factor in separations before the policy became official reflect a larger impact: The Intercept tallied as many as 3,700 in June, and McClatchy reported the real total could be as high as 6,000. Even after the administration backtracked on the policy — following intense backlash and public horror that followed the release of images and recordings of some separated children — it offered little clarity on what to expect in the coming weeks, pledging to continue with its “zero-tolerance” policy, but offering no answers as to how that is possible without the mass detention of families, for which there aren’t enough resources, and would violate an existing legal agreement.