The Trump administration reportedly believed that "no one would care" about the separation of thousands of immigrant families under the "zero-tolerance" policy.

Instead, government officials were caught off-guard by the massive public backlash it received.

Though many administration officials aren't necessarily contrite over the policy, they believe it was a logistical failure and realize they "need to be smarter" if such a policy is implemented in the future, one official told The New Yorker.

The Trump administration was caught off-guard by the amount of public backlash it received against the "zero-tolerance" policy that separated thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the US-Mexico border, one official told The New Yorker.

The outpouring of anger toward the administration lasted for weeks, extending even after President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting the separations.

"The expectation was that the kids would go to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, that the parents would get deported, and that no one would care," the official said.

Instead, the controversy persisted after it became evident the government had no plan to reunite the families it had already split apart. A federal judge eventually intervened, ordering the Trump administration to reunite all eligible families — a lengthy, painstaking process that has so far reunited roughly 2,000 of the 2,654 children it separated.

The government has struggled to reunite hundreds of the remaining children, whose parents have already been deported back to their home countries and in some cases have not yet been found.

One Trump administration official told The New Yorker that there hasn't been any "contrition" expressed internally about the separations.

"But there was frustration with the incompetence of how 'zero tolerance' got implemented. From the perspective of the political leaders here, there's recognition of how badly the policy failed," the official said, adding that the administration recognized "we need to be smarter if we want to implement something on this scale again."

The official said a group of roughly 20 administration officials meet each week at Customs and Border Protection headquarters to discuss how the government should handle asylum-seekers in the aftermath of the family separations.

"The job is to model all the steps in the process. If we go after families, where do we detain them? What are the resources required at each step?" the officials said.