Biden officials have reunited only 52 of at least 1,000 separated migrant families, a task they say is almost impossible because of Trump

• The official tasked with reuniting families separated by a Trump-era policy talked to "60 Minutes."
• Michelle Brane said 52 families had been reunited, a tiny share of the 1,000 or so still separated.

A task force set up by the Biden administration has managed to reunite only 52 families who were separated by the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" border policy, "60 Minutes" reported.

Michelle Brane, the head of the Family Reunification Task Force, told the CBS program on Sunday night that bringing families back together was difficult because officials from the Trump administration kept poor records of whom they separated.

"We estimate that over 1,000, somewhere between 1,000, 1,500, maybe more remain separated," Brane said. "It's very hard to know because there's no record."

She added: "So there's nowhere to go to find out who was separated or not. It really is case-by-case detective work."

President Donald Trump's family-separation policy saw thousands of children taken from their migrant parents at the US-Mexico border.

The children were held in often-squalid detention facilities, and court records obtained by news organizations in June 2018 found that Trump officials split the families up with no clear plan to reunite them.

A 2019 report by the Department for Homeland Security inspector general described the administration's methods of recording separations as "ad hoc" and said officials and IT systems had not been equipped for the task.

In a June 2021 update, the task force said at least 3,913 children had been separated under the policy.

It said prior court orders had reunited 1,779 children with parents, leaving 2,217 - figures that appear to be separate from the estimate of 1,000 or so separated families the task force is seeking to reunite.

Brane told "60 Minutes" that some of the separated children had been gone so long that they considered their host families in the US to be their parents now.

"In many cases, these children are with sponsors who they now call mommy and daddy, right?" she said. "And so it's not as simple as just saying, 'Going to put you on a plane, and reunify you, and then we're done.'"