A federal judge ruled Friday that thousands of additional parents and children who were separated by the American government will be included in a lawsuit over the administration’s family separation.
The Trump administration previously argued that a new group of separated families revealed in a government watchdog report shouldn’t be included in the case, so the ruling comes as a blow to the administration’s efforts.
The Health and Human Services found in its report that thousands of parents and children had not been included in the initial assessment of separated families. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw’s ruling means that officials will now have to comb through a massive trove of case files and pinpoint exactly how many families were separated going back as far as July 1, 2017.
HHS said the exact number is unclear as there were “significant challenges in identifying separated children,” CNN writes.
In his ruling, which represents a major win for the American Civil Liberties Union, Judge Sabraw wrote that “the hallmark of a civilized society is measured by how it treats its people and those within its borders.”
The ACLU filed a case last year prompted by the separation of a Congolese woman and her 7-year-old daughter. The case later became a class action lawsuit. At the time, Sabraw issued a preliminary injunction blocking most family separations at the southern border, ordering the Trump administration to reunite the families it had separated.
Since then, the majority of children have been reunited with their families, but the HHS report raised questions about when separations began and how many more families were separated.
ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project deputy director Lee Gelernt said in a statement Friday that “the court made clear that potentially thousands of children’s lives are at stake and that the Trump administration cannot simply ignore the devastation it has caused.”
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