‘Thousands’ more separated

THOUSANDS more migrant children may have been split from their families at the US-Mexico border than the Trump administration previously reported, a US government watchdog has said.

This could be in part because officials were stepping up family separations long before the border policy that prompted international outrage last spring, according to a report.

It is unclear just how many family separations occurred at the border. Immigration officials are allowed to separate families under certain circumstances under a longstanding policy.

Health and Human Services, the agency tasked with caring for migrant children, did not adequately track the numbers involved until after a judge ruled that children must be reunited with their families, according to the report by the agency’s inspector general.

Ann Maxwell, assistant inspector general for evaluations, said the number of children removed from their parents was certainly larger than the 2,737 listed by the government in court documents which chronicled separations after parents were prosecuted for illegally entering the country under President Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy.

SENIOR Democrats have pledged to investigate a report that Donald Trump directed his personal lawyer to lie to Congress about negotiations over a real estate project in Moscow during the 2016 election.

House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff said: “We will do what’s necessary to find out if it’s true”.

He said the allegation that the president directed Michael Cohen to lie in his 2017 testimony to Congress “in an effort to curtail the investigation and cover up his business dealings with Russia is among the most serious to date”.

The chairman of the House judiciary committee, Jerrold Nadler of New York, said directing a subordinate to lie to Congress was a federal crime.