Moments later, the Department of Justice contradicted this statement, saying the so-called “zero tolerance” policy is unchanged. If the C.B.P. official is correct, it would be great news. But the confusion about this fairly straightforward policy directive is just a tiny taste of the Kafkaesque hell that still faces frantic migrant parents trying to locate kids who’ve been taken from them. Trump’s executive order said nothing about reuniting children and parents who’ve already been separated. Messages from government agencies have been contradictory. There’s still no clear process for many of these parents to even find out where their kids are, never mind get them back.

Even experts are having trouble figuring out what the Trump administration has done with some of these kids. The Times described consular officials from Central America in “crisis mode” as they search for “children as young as 9 months old who did not appear to have been carefully tracked by the federal authorities.” Writing in The Post, an El Paso public defender named Erik Hanshew quoted an incredulous judge: “If someone at the jail takes your wallet, they give you a receipt. They take your kids, and you get nothing? Not even a slip of paper?”

Most competent disaster relief operations include family tracking systems to reunite displaced relatives. “Best practice is always to make sure that if families are broken apart for any reason, somebody is in charge of figuring out a system for putting them back together,” Emily Butera, a senior policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission, told me. Unlike most emergencies, family separation was deliberately engineered by the government, so planning for the aftermath should have been easier. Yet somehow no one appears to have thought to create a database to help parents and children locate each other.

Part of the reason for this failure could be Trump’s indifference to expertise. He appointed E. Scott Lloyd, an anti-abortion activist, to head the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency charged with caring for children after they’re separated from their parents. Lloyd had little discernible experience working with refugees, and he has spent a significant amount of time at ORR trying to prevent pregnant underage migrants from getting abortions. Nothing in his background indicates an ability to handle the sort of complex logistical and humanitarian challenge he’s now presented with.