Santorum declares 1500 kids lost by Trump administration 'not lost'
Rick Santorum tried to defend the Trump administration’s cruel policy by denying the facts — and the dictionary.
Former senator and frequent Trump defender Rick Santorum went to absurd lengths to cover for Trump’s latest immigration debacle.
The Trump administration’s policy of ripping children away from their parents has brought new attention to the fact that the government has lost track of about 1,500 children who have been placed in foster care after crossing the border.
But on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning, Santorum offered the bizarre take that those kids aren’t lost — we just don’t know where they are.
“The reality is a lot of these sponsors are, in many cases, have — they’ve been checked out, but they may have other reasons for not communicating, or dropping off the system,” Santorum said. “So this isn’t, well, we’ve lost these kids. No, they were placed in vetted homes, and for some reason or another these parents are not communicating …”
Panelist Patti Solis Doyle interrupted, asking, “If they are not lost, where are they? Where are they, if they’re not lost?”
Santorum again blamed a lack of communication, asking, “Does that mean that they are lost? No, that means that there is a process that’s going on right now to try to find why these sponsors haven’t checked back in to give us our location.”
The situation that Santorum describes — being unable to determine the location of someone or something — is literally what lost means.
The Trump administration implemented the new policy of ripping children away from parents at the border as a cruel attempt at deterrence.
And chief of staff John Kelly’s comments made it quite clear this was done with no regard for the children’s safety and well-being.
“The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever,” Kelly said in a recent interview. That “whatever” could possibly include putting them into the hands of human traffickers.
Kelly and Santorum are both going to disturbing lengths to justify this horrendous practice. And not only do they appear wholly unconcerned about what happens to these children, they can barely put their defenses of the policy into coherent terms.
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