Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan said on Tuesday that the report claiming that 1,500 immigrant children were “missing” was misleading at best.
He explained, “While there are many possible reasons for this, in many cases sponsors cannot be reached because they themselves are illegal aliens and do not want to be reached by federal authorities.”
Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich addressed the topic on “Outnumbered” on Tuesday, making a few of the same points. (RELATED: Katie Pavlich Vs. Marie Harf Over Trump Calling MS-13 Members ‘Animals’)
“They reunify them with someone in the country, a sponsor who is vetted and sometimes, a lot of the time, those sponsors [are] illegal immigrants and the reason they’re saying these children are lost is because when they make the phone call as a follow-up to make sure the kid’s okay, illegal immigrants in the country aren’t answering the phone because they don’t want to talk to ICE.”
Hargan also called the situation a “classic example of the adage ‘No good deed goes unpunished,'” saying that the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) was actually under no obligation to make follow up phone calls and welfare checks once the children had been placed in a vetted home.
Because they chose to follow up, they were forced to report the number of contacts that were actually made — and that meant that the number of families that didn’t respond to their inquiries would become a part of that report as well.
Hargan also noted that the current situation is being made worse due to the fact that, often, the ORR has not choice but to place unaccompanied children with the very people who have arranged for their illegal entry into the country.