There is not yet a consortium of fake news publishers, but the Left better hurry up and create one if it wants to avoid embarrassments like this one. The flash point is the claim that nearly 1,500 refugee children were allegedly “lost” by federal authorities.
Many sources on the Left cling tenaciously to this story, all with the tacit understanding that the kids went missing under the Trump administration. (Barack Obama would no more lose 1,475 children than his administration would lose track of thousands of guns in an ATF sting operation that went bad. Oh, wait…)
The problem for the mainstream media on the missing children story is that they can’t agree on the facts. The dissension among the ranks is so far-reaching that reporters within a single news organization are publishing competing stories.
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Starting at the bottom of the heap, the ever-reliable Snopes rates as true the claim that the U.S. government lost track of some 1,475 immigrant children. Their evidence is “statements made by Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary of Administration for Children and Families for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on 26 April 2018 at a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee oversight hearing. … Wagner told senators:
From October to December 2017, ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] attempted to reach 7,635 UAC [unaccompanied alien children] and their sponsors. Of this number, ORR reached and received agreement to participate in the safety and well-being call from approximately 86 percent of sponsors. From these calls, ORR learned that 6,075 UAC remained with their sponsors. Twenty-eight UAC had run away, five had been removed from the United States, and 52 had relocated to live with a non-sponsor. ORR was unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,475 UAC.”
That sounds pretty damning to be sure. But other sources suggest there’s more to the story. One is CBS News, which writes:
The children might not necessarily be lost, HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan said in a lengthy statement Tuesday calling claims that the children are “lost,” “completely false.” ORR just has simply been unable to reach the sponsors in a follow-up call 30 days after placing the children with the sponsor, he said. Hargan said some of the sponsors may not be picking up the phone because they are not in the country legally.
New York Times reporter Amy Harmon adds:
Losing track of children who arrive at the border alone is not a new phenomenon. A 2016 inspector general report showed that the federal government was able to reach only 84 percent of children it had placed, leaving 4,159 unaccounted for.
(The Times, incidentally, is one of Snopes’s sources, although the “fact checking” site opts to go with a story written three days before Harmon’s by reporter Ron Nixon.)
