Thousands More Migrant Children Were Probably Taken From Families Than Reported – The New York Times

“Thousands of children were separated from parents and guardians, referred to H.H.S. and released from H.H.S. care before the court order,” Ms. Maxwell said in a conference call with reporters.

“The total number is unknown,” she said. “It is certainly more than 2,737, but how many more, precisely, is unknown.” Moreover, that number may never be known: Department officials, she said, had told her office that there were “no efforts underway to identify that. It would take away resources from children already in care.”

In an email after the call, Ms. Maxwell’s spokesman confirmed that inspectors believed the number of separated children may be “thousands” more than the 2,737 reported to the court.

The inspectors provided no precise data to support that estimate, though Ms. Maxwell said that Health and Human Services had noted a “spike” in the frequency of children being separated from their families, from 0.3 percent of all apprehended families in 2016 to 3.8 percent in 2017.

Family separations have occurred for years, but they had previously been “fairly rare,” Ms. Maxwell said, occurring only in cases where there were concerns about child welfare. That changed in 2017, she said.

Ms. Maxwell said that most of the families on the list of separated families had been reunited, pursuant to the court order. But she said the figures continued to evolve, for several reasons. The absence of an integrated data system to track separated families through the two federal agencies that oversee them was one problem, she said.

Also complicating the issue, she said, was the complex problem of determining which children should be considered officially “separated” from their families. That meant that the list of families entitled to reunification was still being revised as late as December 2018, more than five months after the court order took effect.