Rick Santorum is now defending the Trump administration for having lost nearly 1500 migrant children, and claiming that just because the federal government has no idea where they are and cannot contact them, they are not lost. According to The New York Times, it’s possible these children “could end up in the hands of human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.”
Santorum has built his entire career – first as a staunch conservative Republican U.S. Senator, then as the head of a Christian film company, and a far right wing “patriot” PAC, and now as a paid political pundit – posing as a “pro-life” “family values” evangelical Christian conservative.
“We lose people all the time,” Santorum claimed.
“What happens is these children come into detention,” Santorum said Sunday morning on CNN (video below). He was attempting to eloquently frame the fact that the Trump administration has created and enacted its own policy of literally ripping migrant children from their undocumented parents arms, housing them in facilities separate from their parents – whose only “crime” is wanting a life for their families away from drug gangs, violence, rape, and murder that has sadly overtaken parts of Central America and Mexico.
“There is a vetting process of who the children are assigned to,” Santorum, insisted, despite reports of some children having been released into the care of sex traffickers.
“It’s not just 1,400 children it’s a much larger group of kids.” he continued. The number is actually 1475 children, according to Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen. “And they are assigned to sponsors in this country who go through a process to be able to qualify to be sponsors.”
The former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania went on to tell the CNN audience that the 1475 children are not “lost,” they’re merely “off the radar” because their foster parents “haven’t checked in.”
These are young children and infants as young as 53 weeks old, children who are not theirs and who have every right to expect to be returned to their parents.
“So this isn’t what we’ve lost these kids. No, they were placed in vetted homes and for some reason or another these parents are not communicating –” he continued before being cut off.
“If they are not lost, where are they? Where are they if they’re not lost?” fellow CNN contributor Patti Solis Doyle asked.
Santorum went on to claim “the idea that they’re ‘lost’ I think is an over estimate — is hyperbole to try to create an issue where I don’t really think there is one, other than the fact that the bureaucracy, surprise, surprise, doesn’t work very well.”
Right now there are 1475 young children who may never see their parents again, because the Trump administration has ripped them away from their parents’ arms and then lost them. Rick Santorum is defending this.
Watch: