GRIFF JENKINS (CO-HOST): What is this about the government lost 1500 migrant children?
MARK KRIKORIAN (EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES): What it means is that when these unaccompanied minors -- this is people who came over, that were smuggled here by their parents but they came supposedly on their own, they were handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services, which takes care of this, and then they were placed with their illegal immigrant relatives in the United States at tax payer expense. What this number represents is that 30 days afterwards the social workers at Health and Human Services try to call up on the phone and say, you know, “How are things going?” And this number of people, 1400-something of them, they couldn't get in touch with. They didn't return the phone calls or they lied about what their phone numbers are, or they moved, something like that. And this is exactly the same thing that happened under Obama. We released a report on this a year and a half ago and there was nothing, no, crickets, because the problem here is not that some 4-year-old is wandering the streets in the middle of the night. Nothing like that is happening. The problem here is that the government has no idea where they are, therefore they're never going to show up for their hearings and they're here illegally, permanently. Under Obama that was a good thing, so it never got any news coverage. Now they're saying, “Oh my God, Trump lost kids.” Now it's news.
JENKINS: It's interesting, Mark. So, is it your sense then that this has become political? It appears, if you look at Twitter and media outlets and really some stars, Alyssa Milano and some others tweeting that this is unbelievable, that this has now happened. Comparing it in some cases as if it were the terrible story of the Boko Haram girls, being kidnapped for the purposes of being terrorist's wives. Is this is same thing or is this just a politicization of the story?
KRIKORIAN: Yeah, this is a classic propaganda operation. I think it probably sort of happened by accident. Nobody planned it. But this is the way that propaganda works. You take a fact that's real, a kernel of truth, and then you twist it and manipulate it in such a way that's going to resonate with the target population you're trying to manipulate. This is, there's no question there are actually a handful of people probably, who were, of these young people, who were put in some kind of bad situation. That's entirely possible. But the bulk of this problem is that these illegal immigrants are on the run and the relatives that they were placed with don't want to talk with the government. That's why we can't get in touch with them.
JENKINS: Right, Mark, very quickly because we're almost out of time. For the practical viewers, are these kids missing?
KRIKORIAN: No, they are not missing. They are missing as far as the immigration system is concerned. And the point of that is they basically, we're never going to find them to return them to their own countries. That's the problem, it's not that they're on a milk carton somewhere.
