Officials say ICE completely bungled migrant family reunifications last summer

The Department of Homeland Security wasn't prepared for migrant family reunifications last summer, resulting in dozens of children having to sleep overnight in vans as they waited to be processed, NBC News reports.

Details are now emerging about an incident on Sunday, July 15, at Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas. That afternoon, 37 kids between the ages of 5 and 12 were driven to the center in order to be reunited with their parents; under the Trump administration's rules, they had been separated after crossing the border. The children were in the care of the nonprofit organization BCFS, and emails obtained by NBC News show that officials were frustrated by ICE's inability to smoothly process the children and reunite them with their parents.

The kids were shuttled back and forth between the vans and the inside of the building, and after eight hours, none of them had been processed. The building was too cold, but BCFS was told if they took the kids back to their facility it would delay the process even further, so the children spent the night in the vans, with BCFS bringing in blankets and food. The first child was reunited with their parents shortly after 1 a.m. Monday, and the last was processed at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, NBC News reports, with most of the children spending at least 23 hours waiting.

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ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and a former Health and Human Services official told NBC News the immigration agency "was clearly not ready to deal with the separations and did not take steps necessary to ensure a speedy reunification with their parents. Had DHS acted differently, the process would have been much smoother and the impact on the kids would have been much less." An ICE spokesperson told NBC News this was an "unusual" incident, and "since then, no child has spent more than a few hours waiting to be reunited with their parents."