Lisa Desjardins:

Judy, the report outlines a litany of failures within HHS. They kept children and parents separated for weeks and months longer than necessary.

The report depicts a complete breakdown in communications and planning within the agency, as well as with the rest of government, including no warning when the Trump administration triggered this situation.

Numerous alarms were raised by front-line staff, but ignored by senior officials. All of that led to serious problems in caring for the children.

The report comes from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Ann Maxwell is the assistant inspector general, and she joins me now.

A lot of work your staff did on this. Thank you for talking us to.

First of all, your report lays out problems almost at every juncture. I want the look at one way you look at this. First, there were problems in finding the parents, problems in communicating with the parents, and then problems in transporting the children.

How do you see this scope of what went wrong?