[Cabrera:] The Trump administration doesn't know how many families were separated at the border when it implemented its Zero Tolerance Policy. And they still don't know just how many families have been reunited. A new Homeland Security inspector general report shows widespread errors prevented officials from being able to properly collect and track the data. CNN's Natasha Chen is following this story for us. Natasha, what were these errors and will the government be able to find and reunite these families?
[Natasha Chen, Cnn Correspondent:] Well, Ana, a lot of these errors point to software problems and the systems from different agencies not talking to each other. The report says this caused a lot of extra work and overall this policy ended up costing more than a million dollars in overtime. We're talking about five different IT systems across three different agencies mentioned in this report. For example the Border Patrol system did not even have features in its software to mark that a child was separated from its from his or her family until nearly two months after the Zero Tolerance Policy ended. And as of February of this year, that system still couldn't automatically tell Health and Human Services about a separated child. HHS had to manually check a box that a child was separated from a family based on e-mails from Border Patrol. Here are some quotes from the report to give you an example. CBP adopted various ad hoc methods to record and track family separations. But these methods led to widespread errors. Without a reliable account of all family relationships, we could not validate the total number of separations or reunifications." And they continue then to say that they then cannot tell how many separated families were actually reunified. Here is what they do know. They say CBP estimates during that six and a half week window of the policy there were about 3,000 children separated from their families, an estimated 2100 reunified, but they found 136 children with potential family who were not accurately recorded. And when they extend those dates wider to October 2017 through February of this year, they found an additional 1200 kids not accurately recorded. They say that the agencies were aware of these problems since November of 2017 but did not address them before the Zero Tolerance Policy took effect the following year. And they say, like we mentioned, this cost more than a million dollars in overtime and did not achieve the original goal of deterring catch and release, and ended up resulting in these kids being held for longer than the 72-hour legal limit. And the inspector general did make about five recommendations for fixes, updating systems, automatically sharing data between agencies, and they did acknowledge that most of those recommendations, Ana, are being addressed right now.
[Cabrera:] Wow. That story just never ends. Natasha Chen, thank you for that update.
[Chen:] Thank you.
[Cabrera:] Thank you for joining us. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. Wishing you the very best today. I'm Ana Cabrera. "AT THIS HOUR" starts now.