Claims about missing migrant kids are completely misleading

One of the rules of our politics is that it is permissible to accuse the Trump administration of anything — and the claim that it “lost” 1,476 migrant children fits the bill.

It has lit up social media and made the debate over a new Trump policy of “zero tolerance” at the border even more hysterical than it would be otherwise.

The 1,475 factoid makes it sound as though the Trump administration had these children in its custody and then one day couldn’t find them. Instead, the Department of Health and Human Services had placed them, along with thousands of others who showed up at the border as unaccompanied children, with sponsors in the United States, usually parents or close relatives.

HHS recently added 30-day follow-up phone calls to the longstanding program. At the end of last year, the agency called 7,635 sponsors and couldn’t reach 1,475 of them. Since many of the sponsors are illegal immigrants themselves who don’t want to be in contact with authorities, this isn’t surprising, but it has been spun into a tale of shocking Trump administration callousness.

The misleading story has been used as a hammer against President Trump’s border policy. Prior to 2011, almost all illegal aliens at the border were single adult males, overwhelmingly from Mexico. Now, 40 percent of illegal aliens at the border are families and children and almost half from Central America. This presents challenges we haven’t faced before, made all the worse by gaping loopholes in the law.