I & I Editorial BoardLast week, Axios reported that the Department of Health and Human Services has lost contact with more than 4,500 children who’d crossed the border illegally after it had released them into the country. That’s a third of the migrant children it was supposed to be tracking.
“In 2018, the Trump administration was criticized for being unable to account for the whereabouts of around 1,500 children released from HHS shelters during a three-month period,” Axios reports. “There were around 4,500 such minors as of the end of May who had been released under the Biden administration.”
Axios, a small news organization started just four years ago, uncovered this new wrinkle in the Biden-created border crisis by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request.
The reaction from the mainstream press, leftists, celebrities, and the twitterati?
Crickets.
As of Sunday, the New York Times hadn’t mentioned it. Nor had the Washington Post. Nor any other major newspaper. There’s been no mention of the findings on the network news, on CNN, or on MSNBC. The story has been picked up only by some conservative news outlets.
This is all in glaring contrast to the reaction to the New York Times report in May 2018 that the Trump administration had lost contact with fewer than 1,500 migrant children.
That story set off a tidal wave of outraged news articles, commentaries, and tweets. Every press outlet covered the story. Reporters demanded answers from White House officials. The hashtag #WhereAreTheChildren started trending on Twitter – peaking at 35,000 mentions an hour.
Politicians and celebrities joined the frenzy.
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley complained at the time that “We are doing irreparable harm to our country; to our standing in the world as global leader; to our reputation as human rights champion. The world is watching, and they are watching in horror.”
New York Rep. Adriano Espaillat – who describes himself as “former undocumented immigrant turned progressive congressman” – called the lost children under Trump “a human rights crisis.”
Alyssa Milano addressed a tweet to “Office of Refugee Resettlement, Scott Lloyd, @DHSgov, and all others responsible for losing track of 1500 CHILDREN,” saying “Sorry to bother you on a holiday weekend but #WhereAreTheChildren and is there a plan to find them? When can we look forward to hearing such a plan?”
What were these same folks tweeting about after the Axios story broke?
Merkley was busy congratulating Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his husband for adopting twin babies.
Espaillat put up a reminder for his followers reminding them that it had been 238 days since the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill.
Milano was outraged … but about a Texas law that makes it harder to kill unborn babies.
In fact, pretty much the only use of the #WhereAreTheChildren we could find since the Axios story broke is a tweet noting its absence on Twitter. “I wonder when the #WhereAreTheChildren hashtag will start trending, again though I suspect it won’t because the bad orange man is no longer POTUS.”
Need we point out that the left didn’t give a fig about the plight of migrant children (including those kept in cages) when Barack Obama was president, either?
The left’s concerns about the conditions of such children are entirely dependent on who happens to be president.
Remember that the next time Democrats and celebrities self-righteously try to lecture you about morals or ethics or public policy, or anything else for that matter.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.