The Trump administration has been under fire for 'losing' 1,500 migrant children, but it's far more likely they don't want to be found

• The Trump administration faced accusations over the weekend that it "lost" nearly 1,500 migrant children that it forcibly separated from their parents.
• Those claims aren't quite true - the children are unaccompanied minors who arrived at the border alone, and were reunited with their parents or family members in the US.
• The government said the children's families didn't respond to phone calls checking up on their well-being, leaving their whereabouts uncertain.
• Both the Trump administration and immigration advocates say the families may have purposely avoided those phone calls out of fear they could face deportation.

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The Trump administration found itself facing a torrent of accusations over the weekend that the government had "lost" 1,475 minors, after month-old news resurfaced on Twitter and spawned a tangle of misinformation that has proven difficult to correct.

The controversy quickly became a flashpoint for President Donald Trump's critics, who conflated two separate issues: the Trump administration's new policy to separate some immigrant children from their parents at the border, and the federal government's recent admission that it failed to confirm the whereabouts of 1,475 migrant children.

But the two issues are not one and the same, and both immigration advocates and the Trump administration alike have sought to correct the record on one key point: 1,475 children did not go missing after being separated from their parents at the border.

Rather, the 1,475 children are classified by the government as unaccompanied alien children (UAC) and they arrived at the US border alone.

One month after the government placed those children with "sponsors" in the US - who are often their parents or close relatives - federal officials failed to reach the children's sponsors by phone.

Here's what Steven Wagner, the Acting Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said about the issue at a Senate hearing on April 26 (emphasis ours):

"From October to December 2017, ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] attempted to reach 7,635 UAC 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."

These numbers were reported by several news outlets, including The New York Times, last month. But they received relatively little attention at the time, until they resurfaced last Friday with a vengeance.

A parade of Democrats, journalists, and celebrities took to Twitter to share the month-old news. Some excoriated the Trump administration for "losing" the children and falsely claimed they were forcibly separated from their parents:

Those children aren't 'lost' - they may have gone into hiding

But, as Trump administration officials and some immigration lawyers have pointed out, there may be a very good reason that the federal government had difficulty contacting the children or their sponsors: They may not want to be found.

"We do place kids with families that are here themselves illegally," Wagner, the HHS official who testified in the April 26 Senate hearing, told reporters in a conference call on Tuesday. "So you can imagine that many of those would not choose to speak to a federal official calling on the phone."

He added that the phone calls HHS makes to the families are voluntary - there is no law requiring HHS to call - and that the children are not in government custody while those phone calls are made.

"There's no reason to believe that anything has happened to the kids. If you call a friend and they don't answer the phone, you don't assume that they've been kidnapped," Wagner said. "So that characterization - that the kids are missing - is incorrect."

Immigration experts and attorneys have backed up this claim. Some took to social media over the weekend to explain that it may actually be better for the children and their families if the government cannot track them down.

"Even if they were missing from government detection and surveillance, that is generally a good thing," Prerna Lal, a California-based immigration attorney, wrote in a blog post on Monday. "Calling on them to be found is literally putting more more migrant lives at risk because these children are often released to relatives who do not have immigration status in the United States."

Lal pointed out that the public uproar could, in fact, have the opposite effect that Trump's critics intended; it could result in the prolonged detention of migrant children.

"Basically, panic over these not-actually missing children will allow [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to overturn rules that keep them from locking up unaccompanied minors for longer than 72 hours," Lal wrote. "That's actually not what we want or need right now."

The Trump administration's actual family separation policy

Though the 1,475 children in question were not separated from their parents by the government, the Trump administration has been under fire for implementing a new policy of separating families for a different category of immigrants: people who illegally cross the border with their children.

Earlier in May, the Justice Department unveiled a new "zero tolerance" policy, vowing to criminally prosecute every person caught crossing the border illegally, rather than placing them into civil deportation proceedings as has been customary in the past.

"If you cross the southwest border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech to law-enforcement officials in Scottsdale, Arizona. "If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law."

He continued: "If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border."

The policy made further waves when Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, told NPR that the policy would serve as a "tough deterrent" for migrants seeking to illegally cross the border, and dismissed concerns about the effect of separating children from their parents.

When asked by NPR about those who say the policy is "cruel and heartless," Kelly brushed off the question, according to an interview transcript.

"I wouldn't put it quite that way," Kelly said. "The children will be taken care of - put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long."