A Trump official reportedly estimated 30,000 migrant kids could be separated from their families by August

Border patrol on the U.S.-Mexico border.
(Image credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

As many as 30,000 migrant children could be separated from their families and held in detention centers by the end of the summer, an unnamed senior Trump administration official told The Washington Examiner for a report published Monday.

The source estimated that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been taking about 250 kids daily in recent days — a significantly higher tally than has been previously reported — and calculated that the total could reach 30,000 by August. As of Friday, the Examiner's source said, HHS already has 11,500 of these children detained.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.