Almost a year after President Donald Trump announced the end of his inhumane and child-abusing "zero-tolerance" immigration policy - the one that cruelly and with no reasonable purpose led to the separations of thousands of children from their families at our Southern border - we learn that those separations were made with no intention and no method to ever reunite the children with their families.
Last June, the Department of Homeland Security released a fact sheet claiming the administration knew, from a "central database," the location of all children in its custody and had "a process established to ensure that family members know the location of their children."
But, of course, the "fact sheet" was not fact-based.
In fact, it was just another lie. Like so many other lies from Trump and his "best people."
According to emails provided to NBC News from the House Judiciary Committee, the administration had no database with information for both parents and children and no clear way to match children with parents.
Instead, DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services, charged with the care for those migrant children in government custody, were scurrying to create a single spreadsheet that would accomplish the matches.
"[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful," an HHS official told an ICE official in an email on June 23 - the same day the fact sheet was released. "We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children."
The emails continued with the HHS official writing that he only had information for "about 60" parents.
Trump's "best people" had the good sense, once they began looking at the situation, to say reunification would take a long time. Of course, they never admitted their colossal failure, and it took months to reunite nearly 3,000 families.
Now, almost a year later, several dozen children separated from their families under the zero-tolerance policy still remain in HHS custody.
This was nothing short of child abuse when it began. Now we learn that there was never - never - an early plan to put those families back together.
If we had a war declaration, these atrocities would be war crimes.