the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt thirteen)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

For more than a year after the government instituted its zero tolerance policy, the Trump administration lied about how many families had been affected. In the summer of 2018, the Department of Justice was forced to acknowledge having separated roughly twenty-seven hundred children, but the actual number was more than fifty-six hundred. It took months of litigation to dislodge the accurate tally, because the earlier count had deliberately left out most of what had happened in 2017. The first separations began in two waves that year, and they’d never entirely stopped. There was the El Paso pilot that swept up Keldy, as well as another one, begun slightly earlier, in Yuma, Arizona. That policy, called the Criminal Consequence Initiative, was responsible for the separation of 234 families between July 1 and December 31, 2017. In March 2019, Judge Sabraw expanded the number of eligible class members in the suit, and once he did, the government had no choice but to go back through its data and reconstruct the complete lists of everyone it had separated. The result was that there were now two official troves of names. One was from the summer of 2018, when Sabraw first ruled on the case; the other, which was much more recent, included a fresh accounting of the families separated in 2017. Keldy’s name was second on the list.