Since the middle of July, a group of some twenty government officials has been gathering each week at the headquarters of Customs and Border Protection, in Washington, D.C., to discuss what the Trump Administration should do in the aftermath of the President’s failed zero-tolerance policy. The policy, which called for the criminal prosecution of anyone crossing the border illegally, and led to the separation of more than twenty-five hundred children from their parents, has coincided with a broader effort to dismantle the U.S. asylum system. Yet the government never had a plan for keeping track of the separated parents and children once they were in custody, and, even after a federal judge in San Diego, Dana Sabraw, ordered the government to reunite them, it struggled to comply. “I definitely haven’t seen contrition,” an Administration official, who told me about the weekly meetings, said. “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 lesson, according to the official, didn’t seem to be that the Administration had gone too far in separating families but, rather, that “we need to be smarter if we want to implement something on this scale” again.

The meetings—which, the official said, were first called by a team at the White House that reports directly to Stephen Miller, the President’s senior adviser on policy—include representatives from the Department of Justice, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security. The main focus, the official added, has been to “map out” how the government can detain asylum seekers as they wait for a hearing before an immigration judge, which can take several months: “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?” (While officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice declined to comment on the meetings, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense said in a statement that “the Department of Defense participates in many border planning meetings with DHS, CBP, and other federal partners,” adding that it “has also been asked by DHS and HHS”—the Department of Health and Human Services—“to plan for potential sheltering of family units and unaccompanied children on military installations.“)

In the next week, officials are planning to generate a first round of proposals, which is expected to include projections such as how many beds might be needed in detention centers and children’s shelters, as well as how many additional immigration judges and asylum officers should be hired to keep the system moving. The official told me that the proposals need not be restricted by existing federal laws and court agreements, such as the Flores settlement, which provides protections for the treatment of immigrant children in custody and guidelines on how long they can be detained. (The Administration is also trying to rewrite the terms of the Flores settlement.) It is all part of a “planning exercise,” in which the participants are encouraged to explore any option to end the “catch and release” of asylum seekers.

Such boldness doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. To date, no one in the Trump Administration has been held accountable for its family-separation policy, even after evidence has steadily mounted as to its immense human costs and administrative failures. The government’s own data show that it has had no appreciable effect on migration patterns throughout the summer, but the Administration pursued the policy anyway, targeting immigrant families. Zero tolerance was designed for the government to criminally prosecute all migrants who crossed the border illegally, yet, in May, less than a third of those arrested by Border Patrol were referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution, and a significant number of those referrals involved parents who crossed the border with their children. For years, there has been frustration among federal immigration authorities who felt that parents were taking advantage of laxer enforcement at the border when they travelled to the United States with their children. There are certainly flaws in the system, but the zero-tolerance policy was intended to send a message of unprecedented harshness. According to a report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, at Syracuse University, “The Administration has not explained its rationale for prosecuting parents with children when that left so many other adults without children who were not being referred for prosecution.” Michelle Brané, of the Women’s Refugee Commission, told me, “It’s still baffling to me that no one has had to answer for this.”

So who is to blame, and will there be any accountability? The family-separation policy raised questions about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is responsible for the treatment of parents in detention, and the Department of Health and Human Services, which is tasked with caring for the separated children. But, a former government official told me, the prime movers behind zero tolerance were members of a “cabal of anti-immigration guys” at the White House, the D.H.S., and the Department of Justice. Stephen Miller and a Justice Department adviser named Gene Hamilton led the discussion, the former official said. “They want to have a different America, and they’re succeeding. Now they’re doubling down—they’re making another run at lowering the number of refugees who are admitted to the United States.” The failure of the zero-tolerance policy has done little, if anything, to diminish the group’s standing; on the contrary, Miller has only seemed to gain allies in the government. Within the President’s inner circle, according to the Times, he is considered a “walking policy encyclopedia” on immigration.

Despite the public outcry over family separation, Customs and Border Protection, which is in charge of immigration enforcement at the border, has been largely overlooked, perhaps because it’s been upstaged by the notoriety of ICE, its better-known institutional sibling. But decisions about whom the government would refer for prosecution were made by officials at C.B.P., and it was Border Patrol agents at C.B.P., not ICE officers, who took children from their parents’ arms. During the summer, the commissioner of the agency, Kevin McAleenan, denied that the Trump Administration was deliberately separating families, even as he directed implementation of a policy doing just that. In late June, just days after Sabraw ordered the government to reunite the separated families, Kirstjen Nielsen, the head of D.H.S., made an announcement. Ronald Vitiello, the deputy commissioner of C.B.P. and a law-enforcement veteran, was tapped to replace Thomas Homan as the director of ICE. I was in El Paso just before the news broke, when I received a text message from an ICE officer: “From the frying pan to the fire.”

Some five hundred and sixty children are still separated from their parents, including twenty-four who are five years old or younger, and the parents of more than three hundred and sixty of them have already been deported. Between seven hundred and eight hundred other children were reunited with their parents in detention, where their situation is especially confounding. About half of the reunited parents have final orders of deportation—in many instances, because they’d been pressured to sign papers waiving their rights to pursue their immigration cases. As a result, families face a choice: either a parent and child can agree to be deported together, or the child can stay in this country alone while her own case is decided. Last Thursday night, Sabraw issued an order temporarily blocking the deportation of reunited parents so that they could have more time to weigh their legal options with immigration lawyers. As Dara Lind wrote, at Vox, “The question right now is when they will actually be deported, not whether they will be.”

I asked the current Administration official whether the outcry over family separation had caught the government by surprise. It had, the official said. “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.” Yet, when it became clear that the public did, the Administration chose not to change course.