Emails show Trump admin had ‘no way to link’ separated migrant children to parents

On the same day the Trump administration said it would reunite thousands of migrant families it had separated at the border with the help of a “central database,” an official was admitting privately the government only had enough information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids, according to emails obtained by NBC News.

“[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful,” a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. “We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children.”

In the absence of an effective database, the emails show, officials then began scrambling to fill out a simple spreadsheet with data in hopes of reuniting as many as families as they could.

Click here and here to read the emails.

The gaps in the system for tracking separations would result in a months-long effort to reunite nearly 3,000 families separated under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. Officials had to review all the relevant records manually, a process that continues. Read more

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