Amna Nawaz:

We have had hints along the way in the many months we have been reporting on this just how bad the bookkeeping was. We didn't know exactly how much until this report.

When they first had to give a number, they said it was around 2,600, right? And over the next few months, they revised it up every time they said they had more information that came into their knowledge.

Let's remember there are two agencies here. DHS does — DHS, rather, does the separating at the border, and then they hand over the children to HHS, who receives them for care and custody.

I got a look at that shared database that they were trying to use to track children. There was never a check box that said, this child has been separated, or a space to put in information about their parent. It was up to the DHS officers to either choose or remember to put that in the comments section.

And they found that in this report just how bad that bookkeeping was. When HHS noticed there was an uptick in separated children coming, they tried to informally track it.

The report said, the staff initially recorded separated children on an Excel spreadsheet. This was later replaced by a SharePoint database. However, use of the tools was not formalized in procedures and access was limited.

Judy, when they tried to bring people back together, they had to go through 60 different databases, sometimes just cross-referencing last names to try to figure out if kids were separated or not.