Migrant children are led in a line by US Customs and Border Protection personnel at a detention center near the Mexican border in the town of Tornillo, Texas, June 2018. Photo: Reuters.

Separated from their parents at the United States-Mexico border by the government of former President Donald Trump, 998 children remain without being reunited with their families

two years after Joe Biden, after assuming the presidency in January 2021, issued an executive order and establish a working group to reverse the situation.

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported Thursday that,

of the 998 children still separated, 148 are in the process of reunification.

The Trump Administration separated thousands of migrant families under an

overall “zero tolerance” policy

that called for the prosecution of all unauthorized border crossers in the spring of 2018.

Oversight committees and lawyers

have discovered that the separations began before and continued after the official start of that policy.

DHS said the task force's hard work reviewing fragmented information kept by the Trump administration on the policy has so far found that

3,924 children, mostly Central Americans, were separated at the border.

Many were located and gathered before Biden took office through a court process after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit to stop the separation policy.

“The number of newly identified families continues to increase as families come forward and identify themselves

,” DHS said in a fact sheet on the task force's work released Thursday.

To date, the task force has brought together 600 families.

(With information from Reuters)