1,500 “Missing” Children

You may have heard the government has lost 1,500 kids who crossed the border illegally. That’s not really the case, and it misses the real outrage.

The most-discussed story in the news recently has been about the 1500 “missing” children. Twitter hashtags such as “#WhereAreTheChildren” and “#MissingChildren” were created and used by the right and the left to express outrage. There’s only two problems… first, many have misunderstood what’s going on. And second, that confusion has obscured the real outrage: how our government is treating vulnerable families.

The 1,500 missing children story comes from the Senate testimony of HHS official Steven Wagner. He told senators that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “had lost track of 1,475 children . . . who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on their own . . . and subsequently were placed with adult sponsors in the United States.”

It was a startling admission. But then, the story was conflated with an announcement by Attorney General Jeff Se