Day 728: Trump’s forced family separation policy worse than previously revealed

Donald Trump’s heinous policy of separating children from their families at the border before putting them in squalid conditions is well documented. But amid new details Thursday, impossibly, the situation is even worse than previously reported.

The exact numbers of forced-separated families will never be known because the government failed to properly track said families, according to a Politico report detailing a federal audit of the situation. The audit estimated the government has undercounted the number of separated children by “thousands” beginning in 2017.

The Trump administration separated thousands more migrant kids at the border than it previously acknowledged, and the separations began months before the policy was announced, according to a federal audit released Thursday morning.

“More children over a longer period of time” were separated at the border than commonly known, an investigator with the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general’s office told reporters Thursday morning. “How many more children were separated is unknown, by us and HHS” because of failures to track families as they were being separated, he said.

HHS officials involved in caring for the separated children and reunifying families estimated “thousands” of additional children are separated at the border, the inspector general said.

Additionally, according to an NBC News report, Trump wanted to unilaterally strip migrants of their asylum rights in an effort to deter other would-be asylum seekers.

Trump administration officials weighed speeding up the deportation of migrant children by denying them their legal right to asylum hearings after separating them from their parents, according to comments on a late 2017 draft of what became the administration’s family separation policy obtained by NBC News.

The draft also shows officials wanted to specifically target parents in migrant families for increased prosecutions, contradicting the administration’s previous statements. In June, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the administration did “not have a policy of separating families at the border” but was simply enforcing existing law.

The authors noted that the “increase in prosecutions would be reported by the media and it would have a substantial deterrent effect.”

Some of the policy has been put into effect while others have not yet been applied.

In sum, the Trump administration has tried driving a wedge between migrant families by separating them at the border, detaining some in tent cities and prison camps, and denying them their legal right to asylum hearings. In addition, they’ve lost track of thousands of children, many of whom are destined to be de facto orphans, never to be reunited with their families.

728 days in, 734 to go

Follow us on Twitter at @TrumpTimer