The Department of Justice Inspector General released a report laying blame for the roundly-criticized immigrant family separation policy on top DoJ officials, particularly former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, NBC News reports.

The policy, in place for two months in 2018, resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents, who were then deported.  Hundreds of children are still not reunited with their parents despite multiple court orders for the administration to reunite the families.

The IG report finds that Sessions and Rosenstein instructed local federal prosecutors that they should carry out prosecutions of adults even if they were the sole custodian of children as they crossed the border.

“We concluded that the Department’s single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations,” the Inspector General’s report said.

During an April 2018 meeting, an aide to Sessions and Rosenstein noted “the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General both expressed a willingness to prosecute adults in family units if DHS made the decision to start referring such individuals for prosecution.”

“I just spoke with the DAG (Rosenstein.) He instructed that, per the [Attorney General’s] policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child,” according to note by then-U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas John Bash following a conversation with Rosenstein.

For their part, Sessions and Rosenstein pushed blame onto Donald Trump, the White House and then Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, saying that if Nielsen had not referred the cases for prosecution, the DoJ would not have pursued them.  Sessions declined to participate in the IG investigation.

“Since leaving the department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy. It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better,” Rosenstein said in a statement.