CNN commentator Rick Santorum on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s policy of tearing children away from families seeking refuge in America, addressing recent reports that noted federal agencies had lost track of around 1,500 immigrant children placed with approved sponsors or family members by claiming that the government “lose[s] people all the time.”
Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, blamed the parents for putting their kids at risk by seeking refuge in a first-world nation that proclaims on its most famous statue, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Migrants arriving at the U.S. border with Mexico are mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and are fleeing violence, crime and drug cartels in their home countries.
Santorum said parents have a “moral obligation” to make sure that their children don’t end up being taken away by immigration authorities, putting the onus back on them for the administration’s policy.
“At some point the parents have to take responsibility for their children,” Santorum said on CNN’s State of the Union program.
Santorum explained that the children — some of whom are infants barely 1 year old — were placed with “qualified” sponsors and were not actually lost, noting that many of the sponsors may have purposely chosen not to check in with officials from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which had placed them.
However, Santorum then fueled anxieties further by adding casually, “We lose people all the time in a lot of other government programs.”
“The question is, they haven’t had communication with these previously vetted sponsors,” Santorum continued. “Does that mean that they are lost? No, that means there is a process that is going on right now to try and find why these sponsors haven’t checked back in. But the idea that 100 percent of the sponsors are going to check in, of course that’s never going to be the case.”
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is unable to determine the whereabouts of 1,475 children who showed up at the U.S. southern border alone between October and December, according to Steven Wagner, the assistant secretary of the agency at a Senate hearing last month. According to the Times, “Officials learned that 6,075 children remained with their sponsors. Twenty-eight had run away, five had been removed from the United States and 52 had relocated to live with a nonsponsor.”
The exact whereabouts of the 1,475 remaining children remain unknown, though as immigration advocates, reporters, and lawyers note, it’s possible, as Santorum stated, that many chose to stop communicating with ORR out of fear that the immigrant children might be subjected to further draconian immigration policies instituted by the Trump administration.
The administration has said it will criminally prosecute people who cross the southern U.S. border, placing parents in the criminal justice system and placing their children in the ORR system. In March, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit against the Trump administration, for removing young children from hundreds of parents who are awaiting asylum hearings.
Public outcry over the policies reached fever pitch Friday evening and Saturday after MSNBC Host Chris Hayes ran a segment about the practice and the lawsuit on his show.
Earlier this month, White House chief of staff John Kelly defended the policy of separating families saying that while the vast majority of the people moving into the United States illegally “are not bad people,” they don’t assimilate well because they don’t speak English and that it acts as a “tough deterrent.”
“The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever,” Kelly said.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that the Trump administration’s policy of separating families attempting to cross the U.S. southern border had resulted in “nearly 1,500 missing children, some of whom likely have ended up in the hands of human traffickers.” As ThinkProgress subsequently reported, many of those children were actually placed with sponsors, many of whom are close family members or distant relatives, who may have simply decided to cut off contact with federal officials voluntarily or who may have simply missed phone call check-ins. The article has been updated throughout to correct that discrepancy.