The Trump administration said late Saturday that it has 2,053 “separated minors” in custody, and a formal process has been established to reunite them with their parents before deportation.

The joint declaration by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services came three days after President Trump’s hastily crafted executive order abruptly halting the widely denounced practice of taking away the children of migrant parents who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

The federal agencies said 522 children have already been returned to their parents, and the government would allow mothers and fathers facing deportation to request that their children are sent home with them.

“The United States government knows the location of all children in its custody and is working to reunite them with their families,” the statement said. “This process is well-coordinated.”

The international furor over the separation system was barely mollified by the president’s order in recent days as key federal agencies struggled to explain how they would put families back together and ensure migrants’ children did not remain in U.S. foster care thousands of miles from their parents.

There have been multiple cases in recent weeks of parents sent back to Central America without their children, who had no idea where their children may be held at one of more than 100 government shelters.

Saturday’s statement said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has established the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in South Texas “as the primary family reunification and removal center for adults in their custody.”

Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, toured this facility Saturday afternoon with a congressional delegation. The center, located in Los Fresnos, Texas, currently houses women whose children have been taken from them, including breastfeeding mothers.

Pingree, speaking via telephone from an airport on her return to Maine, said none of the agency officials and detention center staff they spoke to Saturday had any information about if or how separated children would be reunified with their parents.

“It would be very positive news if the administration has a real plan and knows how to find the families and put the them back together, but after a whole day of a lot of questions from 25 members of Congress, nobody (in South Texas) had answers about this, so it’s really surprising that they had this all in the works,” Pingree said.

Under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” crackdown on illegal immigration, parents who cross illegally with children have been sent to face criminal prosecution while their kids are assigned to foster care facilities run by Health and Human Services.

The parents are typically then transferred to adult immigration jails run by ICE, with little ability to know where their children are or how to regain custody. The lack of coordination between the two agencies has led to weeks of confusion and swelling numbers of children in government care who were at risk of being stranded in American foster care, thousands of miles from their parents.

Now, under the government’s new plan, parents will receive more information about the whereabouts of their children and telephone operators will facilitate more frequent communication, according to Saturday’s statement.

The reunification plan will have a few exceptions, according to the late-night communique.

“There will be a small number of children who were separated for reasons other than zero tolerance that will remain separated,” the statement said. “Generally only if the familial relationship cannot be confirmed, we believe the adult is a threat to the safety of the child, or the adult is a criminal alien.”

ICE will also implement a system for tracking separated family members and rejoining them before their deportation as a unit. It also will put parents separated from their children in designated units where they will have easier access to communication, and ICE agents will coordinate travel planning and documentation with Health and Human Services personnel to make sure parents and children depart the United States together, the statement said.

Staff writer Colin Woodard contributed to this report.

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