Trump Justice Department Adopts 'Zero Tolerance' Border Policy, Indefinitely Loses Roughly 5,500 Children Required For Its Implementation

WASHINGTON. The Department of Justice on Friday announced a new "zero tolerance" prosecution policy at the southern border, an enforcement strategy administration officials confirmed would require the routine separation of accompanying children from any adult criminally charged with entering the country outside a designated port of entry.

The memo, signed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, made no mention of children, an omission officials at the Department of Health and Human Services later identified as an operational challenge once thousands of separated minors began arriving in HHS custody without records linking them to the parents from whom they had been taken.

Within months, more than 5,500 children, including infants and toddlers, had been transferred to a network of federal shelters, tent camps, and converted warehouses operated by private contractors at taxpayer expense. Senior Adviser Stephen Miller, sources familiar with the policy's design said, viewed the trauma generated by the separations not as a flaw but as the operative deterrent mechanism.

"I hate to see separation of parents and children," President Trump told reporters one Sunday in June, in remarks the White House asked the press to evaluate against the policy his administration was at that moment continuing to enforce. "It's a Democrat bill," the President added, attributing responsibility for the separations to legislation that did not exist.

The policy was formally rescinded by executive order on June 20, 2018, after a federal judge ordered reunification within fixed deadlines the administration would proceed to miss. As of court filings in 2025, more than 1,000 children separated under the policy have still not been reunified with their families, in part because the administration's tracking systems were not designed to permit reunification, and in part because some parents had by that point been deported to countries where they could not be located.

At press time, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed it had no operational definition of "lost child" beyond "child whose parent the federal government can no longer find."