More than 900 children have been separated from their parents at the US border with Mexico in the year after a judge ordered the practice to be curtailed.

The American Civil Liberties Union said Donald Trump’s administration split 911 children, including babies and toddlers, from the rest of their families over increasingly dubious allegations and over minor offences.

The ACLU filed a motion at a San Diego court on Tuesday asking a judge to block the government’s ongoing separation of families of the border and questioning whether the action was legal.

Following a legal challenge by the union last year, the administration said in June 2018 it would end its “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting those who illegally cross the border and separating them from their children.

US district court judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego ordered more than 2,800 migrant children to be reunited with their parents in a court supervised process.

But the ACLU has now gone back to court, claiming the government was still separating families and breaking its pledge to end the practice.

The 911 separations took place between 28 June 2018 and 29 June 2019, shortly after US judge Dana Sabraw ordered that the practice of splitting children up at the border be stopped except in limited circumstances, like threats to child safety.

The judge left individual decisions to the administration’s discretion.

Since then, a parent was separated for damaging property valued at $5 (£4.10). The ACLU also found an instance of a one-year-old separated after an official criticised their father for letting them sleep with a wet nappy.

In another case, a two-year-old Guatemalan girl was separated from her father after authorities examined her and found she had a fever, nappy rash, and was malnourished and underdeveloped. The father was accused of neglect, despite coming from a community which was “extraordinarily impoverished” and rife with malnutrition.

A seven-year-old girl has been in custody since June, after being separated from her father because he had a conviction of driving without a license and previously entered the country without authorisation.

The ACLU found that about 20% of the children separated within a year of the judge’s order were under five years old.

Most parents went weeks without knowing where their children were and some didn’t know why they had been split up.

About one third of the 900 separated children have been with the Catholic Charities Community Service, who say only three children in their care have been reunited with their parents.

The CCCS says 185 were released to sponsors after weeks or months in government shelters and 33 were returned to their home countries.

Lee Gelernt, lead attorney in the family separation lawsuit and deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said: “It is shocking that the Trump administration continues to take babies from their parents. Over 900 more families join the thousands of others previously torn apart by this cruel and illegal policy.

“The administration must not be allowed to circumvent the court order over infractions like minor traffic violations.”

It comes soon after passionate speeches made by Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said she met women who were forced to drink from toilets when sinks in their rooms were not working.

A government watchdog report found “dangerous overcrowding” at migrant detention centres on the US-Mexico border which it said needs “immediate attention”.

The ACLU came to its conclusions after looking at reports from the Trump administration.

They have now asked Judge Sabraw to order the government to justify the separations over the last year and clarify the criteria for doing so.

The US is experiencing a surge in the number of children coming from Central America, with Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan telling the Senate on Tuesday that 300,000 have tried to cross the border since 1 October 2018.

More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents at the time of Judge Sabraw’s original ruling.

It forced the government to reunite them with their families.

The judge also ordered the administration to find the children who were separated from 1 July 2017. An internal watchdog estimates this figure is in the thousands, but the number is not yet confirmed, as adequate tracking systems were not in place at the time.

The justice department has not yet released a comment.

Other examples of child separation cases include a two-year-old girl who was split up from her father after officers questioned the authenticity of her birth certificate.

Her father spoke an indigenous language and had no interpreter but was proved to be her dad after a DNA test.

A group of children were taken from women who officials thought had gang ties, but were in fact gang targets.

The ACLU said 14 parents were separated based on immigration convictions combined with driving under the influence or unspecified traffic offences.

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