SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Biden administration said Tuesday that it has identified more than 3,900 children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border under former President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy on illegal crossings, providing one of the more detailed accounts of a chapter in U.S. immigration history that drew widespread condemnation.

The Biden administration’s Family Reunification Task Force count of 3,913 children separated from July 1, 2017, to the end of Trump’s presidency is well below the more than 5,500 children identified by the American Civil Liberties Union in court filings, based on government information.

The task force said it identified “nearly all” children who were separated under the zero-tolerance policy but will review another 1,723 cases since July 2017, which would bring total cases examined to 5,636, close to the ACLU tally. The discrepancy appears to stem largely from a federal court ruling in San Diego that excluded 1,723 children who were separated for reasons other than Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, such as risk of child endangerment or questions about parentage.

The task force will also try to determine if children were separated during the first six months of Trump’s presidency, starting in January 2017, which was outside the scope of the ACLU lawsuit. That could raise the final number.

Of the 3,913 children, 1,786 have been reunified with a parent, mostly during Trump’s tenure, parents of another 1,695 have been contacted and the whereabouts of 391 have not been established. Many who have been contacted were released to other family members.

The Biden administration has vowed to reunite parents who are still apart from their children, but the pace has been slow and it is unclear how high that number will go. The first four parents were returned to the United States last month, part of what the task force identified as an initial group of 62 people — 28 from Guatemala, 20 from Honduras, 13 from El Salvador and one from Mexico. Administration officials say 29 of the 62 have received final clearances to return to the United States, which should occur after travel arrangements are made.

Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrant rights project, said he wished the reunifications had happened more quickly but welcomed the Biden administration’s efforts.

“We believe the negotiations we’re having with the administration are constructive and being held in good faith,” Gelernt told reporters. “Our hope is now they’ve put in a process for reunifying people it can be scaled up.”

Gelernt said families not only need to be reunited but provided mental health and support services and compensation. For now, reunited families are being allowed to remain in the United States on a temporary basis, but the ACLU wants the administration to give them a more lasting solution, he said.

“It’s not a permanent status,” he said. “That is foremost in the negotiations.”

The report provided data that hadn’t been previously released. Nearly 60% of children separated under the zero-tolerance policy were Guatemalans (2,270), followed by Hondurans (1,150), Salvadorans (281), Mexicans (75), Brazilians (74) and Romanians (23).

The Border Patrol’s Yuma, Arizona, sector recorded the highest number of separations of the agency’s nine sectors on the Mexican border with 1,114. The Rio Grande Valley in Texas, which dominated media attention as the busiest corridor for illegal crossings by far, was second with 1,025 separations. The El Paso, Texas, sector, which was site of a trial run of the policy in 2017 that was not publicly disclosed at the time, was third with 982 separated children.

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LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) — A federal emergency shelter in California is starting to receive immigrant children from border facilities in what advocates hope will be an improvement in their care.

As many as 150 children were expected Thursday at the Long Beach Convention Center at the latest in a series of sites set up across the country following a rise in the number of immigrant children stopped alone on the Mexico border, the Department of Health and Human Services said.

After border facilities grew crowded with children who said they had not been given showers for days, the department started opening large-scale temporary shelters to house these minors until they can be released to relatives who can care for them in the U.S.

The center in Long Beach is expected to be able to hold up to 1,000 children. Officials were given a tour of the site, which had books, stuffed animals and backpacks laid out on cots and butterfly decorations displayed on the walls. There was a recreation area with soccer nets, board games and large screens to watch movies.

Children will receive three or four hours of daily classroom time and get to play outdoors. They are expected to be released to family on average in a week to 10 days, Mayor Robert Garcia said. He added that he was told by federal officials that the site could prove to be a model for how to make the shelters as welcoming as possible.

“It looks like a place where children can be,” Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, told reporters after the tour.

With more than 20,000 immigrant children currently in government custody, U.S. officials have been scrambling to open such facilities.

The government failed to prepare for an increase in mostly Central American children traveling alone as President Joe Biden ended some of his predecessor’s hardline immigration policies. The Biden administration decided against quickly expelling unaccompanied minors from the country as the Trump administration had done for eight months.

Children are initially taken to border facilities that aren’t equipped to house them for long periods of time. From there, they are being sent to these shelters while case workers assess which relatives are suitable to take them.

The minors will then go through immigration court proceedings to see whether they are eligible to stay in the U.S. or must return to their home countries.

The site in Long Beach is being operated by DRC, a disaster management company, and expected to mostly house girls, said Bonnie Preston, acting regional director for Health and Human Services

. She said she could not immediately say how much it would cost to operate the site.

“We’re really in an emergency situation,” she said. “The budgets are, you know, rolling out as we see what the need is, and the budget will meet the need to keep the children safe.”

Lindsay Toczylowski​​, executive director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said she was pleased the shelter had already been equipped with workspace for attorneys to come in and meet with children to explain how the U.S. immigration system works and discuss their legal cases. She said it was clear efforts were taken to make the large site feel comfortable for children, but hopefully they will only be there a very short time.

“This will be a safe place for kids to be, but it should be temporary,” she said.

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