Justice Department lawyer Scott Stewart objected and said asking the government to track down all families the government had separated would “blow the case into some other galaxy of a task” — which Gelert calls “remarkable,” given that the government separated them in the first place

“Under 'zero tolerance' — which is the reason they are separating families in the first place

The HHS inspector general’s report last month also found “thousands” more children were separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border than initially thought — and they had not been included in the government’s tally of 2,654 separated families as of June 2018. It found that families were being separated as early as July 2017, long before Sessions announced the “zero tolerance” policy in April 2018.

“There’s no uniform process for determining parental fitness,” and the child's best interest, said Laura Peña, the attorney who authored the Texas Civil Rights Project's report and represented Perez-Domingo.That’s a high-stakes determination that Border Patrol agents are not equipped to make, Peña and other immigrant advocates told The World. CBP’s justifications for separating families are often vague or unsubstantiated, and could violate the Ms. L court order, they say.“We are seeing an overuse of separations based on what they call ‘law enforcement’ purposes,” said Eleanor Acer, senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First. “And in some cases, there is really no basis for that. There’s no process for any of this, or independent review for any of this.”

He did not understand when a CBP officer accused him of not being the girl’s biological father and forging her birth certificate — then took away his little girl.