As an immigration attorney working along the US-Mexico border in McAllen, Texas, Carlos García says he’s seen “a lot of sad stuff” over the years. But what he encountered at the McAllen federal courthouse Tuesday left him lost for words.

“You walk into the courtroom and there are 90 people waiting to be prosecuted for illegal entry,” he says. “When you talk to parents about losing their children and having their children taken away from them, it’s a different feeling. I can’t even describe it.”

García is one of several lawyers affiliated with the Texas Civil Rights Project who have offered legal assistance to detainees awaiting their fate at the local courthouse, after the Trump administration began implementing its zero-tolerance policy in April. The policy refers all illegal border crossings for criminal prosecution, including asylum seekers and regardless of whether crossers are traveling with children. Since May, the government has separated 2,342 children from their families, according to the Department of Homeland Security, stoking widespread outrage as reports of the separations and photos of children sleeping in cages circulated on social media over the weekend.

President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that would keep children with their parents in detention indefinitely. In a conference call with reporters, Gene Hamilton, counselor to the attorney general, said the order is effective immediately. But that still leaves thousands of families waiting to be reunited. Asked what happens to the kids currently being held, Hamilton said, "I'm going to have to defer to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services as to the specific answer to that question." The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to repeated requests for comment from WIRED.

Before the order was signed, the Texas Civil Rights Project’s lawyers interviewed more than 300 detainees over the last two weeks, none of whom have been confirmed to be reunited with their children.

“A couple parents asked me, ‘How do I know I’m not going to be deported and my child won’t stay in the US?’” García says. “I didn’t have an answer for them.”

That’s because there are no easy answers. The system that tracks children from their initial capture at the border to their detention at group shelters and finally to their release to sponsors is as labyrinthine as it is opaque. (It took WIRED more than 20 rounds of emails to get answers from the three government agencies involved about how the process works.)

“The families I work with can’t find their kids. Across the board their experience is that they continue to ask their deportation officers where their children are and they are not told,” says Austin-based attorney Kate Lincoln Goldfinch, whose firm works with hundreds of asylum seekers at a time.

The Women’s Refugee Commission is putting together recommendations for Congress and the White House to “establish a clear and consistent process by which DOJ, DHS, and HHS” record and track families who are separated, according to senior policy adviser for migrant rights Emily Butera. Among WRC’s recommendations are specifics like including the place separation occurred in every child’s case file, and providing parents with written and verbal information about where their children are being sent, as well as contact information for that facility, and the process for locating their child in detention. WRC also calls for regular phone calls between family members, a ban on time limits for those phones, and the promise that parents will be notified of and allowed to participate in any immigration court proceeding affecting their child, free of charge.