The Officer of Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report on May 29, 2020 detailing inconsistencies between the agency’s official reports on family separation and the realities on the ground. The report shows that the government not only separated more children than it previously reported but did so in violation of its own guidelines.

As just one example, the report shows that the government forcibly separated at least 60 asylum-seeking families who legally sought protection at a port of entry. Previously, DHS claimed to have separated only seven families at ports of entry. According to the government’s own guidelines, the “Zero Tolerance” policy applied only to families who didn’t cross at a port of entry (a requirement that itself was unduly burdensome and likely unlawful for families seeking protection).

More than half of those separations were based solely on the parents’ prior immigration violations. Eighty percent of these separated children were under the age of 12, and all of them were separated from their parents for at least four weeks, with one remaining separated for more than a year.

The youngest child forcibly separated from a parent under these circumstances was a five-month-old baby, served by the Young Center, who was taken from his mother alongside his three brothers, who were 12, 8, and 5 years old respectively. Their mother had been processed for credible fear, but her children were taken from her under the pretext of prior entries to the United States. The family spent seven weeks apart. During this time, the mother was unable to nurse her baby and lost the ability to do so.

This is not the first time the OIG has found discrepancies between DHS’s official numbers and the number of families separated. A previous OIG with a broader analysis of DHS’s data from October 1, 2017 to February 14, 2019 revealed that the agency failed to record data about 1,233 children who were separated from their families. Due to inconsistent and incomplete record-keeping by DHS, the investigative body “could not validate the total number of separations or reunifications”—confirming that we may never know the exact number of children forcibly taken from their parents by the U.S. government.

At the Young Center, we know that family separation started before the official date of announcement by the government and continues today, nearly two years after the policy was officially ended by executive order and a federal court. Having served hundreds of forcibly separated children, we’ve seen that in nearly every case the separation was unnecessary, unlawful, and destructive to parent-child relationships. We continue to call on Congress to demand transparency from DHS and end new forms of family separation, including the Remain in Mexico program and border closure and corresponding deportation of children to danger under the cover of COVID-19.