Rene Denfeld:
The public exploded in outrage at the news in April: Federal agencies had lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children. These were kids who had shown up at the border unaccompanied, most of them from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and were placed with sponsors. But the Office of Refugee Resettlement was unable to determine the current whereabouts of 1,475 of the 7,635 children who had been placed last year. Members of Congress said the children had been thrown to the wolves; they held rallies. Twitter groaned under the anger of thousands of users who expressed shock that this had been allowed to happen, many of them mistakenly noting that these kids had been taken from their parents.
Later reporting clarified that these children had arrived alone at the border, and that their adult sponsors were often relatives (85 percent were placed with parents or close family members) who may have been deliberately not responding to agency attempts to contact them.
Meanwhile, there are thousands of other children who are unaccounted for in this country — more than 60,000 foster children who have gone missing.
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