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.

The family separations are not required by law, as President Trump has claimed, and were instituted by his administration as an immigration deterrent. Some of the families affected have not crossed the border illegally but rather are following legal procedure to seek asylum. The Obama administration, which deported more people than any previous presidency, separated a few families after illegal border crossings, but more often it placed them, intact, in detention camps or released them to await their court dates.

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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.