I hope that by now, you have surely heard that ICE "lost" 1,500 immigrant children. Some of which are feared to have been handed directly to human traffickers. Congrats, America. We're definitely becoming great again.

In case you are wondering what "lost" means, let me explain it to you.

Last year, about 7,000 children arrived unaccompanied to the border. At least, that we know of. These children were held somewhere by the Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement. Sometime later they were placed into the homes of sponsors. Of those seven thousand, some ran away, some were deported, some were placed in different homes, and 1,500 are now unaccounted for.

Fifteen hundred children are now unaccounted for!

And the current government is claiming it is not their legal responsibility and this is not okay. Health and Human Services' should not be able to clean their hands of those children just because they were placed into the hands of sponsors. There should still be check up from social workers or from some type of government official to make sure that those children are healthy and well taken care of.

I can hear in my head right now people arguing that this is not our responsibility. That this is the fault of the parents who let their children crossed. Those people are wrong. We have no idea what brought those children to the United States border. We cannot possibly know if they're parents are even alive. In fact, I don't think some of those children know either. They could be refugees from Honduras, orphans from elsewhere, or even just children that they're parents were trying to send to family across the border assured by whoever they hired to get them across, that they would actually get across. None of it matters.

What matters is that Health and Human Services took them in and sent them to sponsors we know nothing about. Do they? Do they know who these people are beforehand? How are these people chosen?

Eight of these seven thousand children were forced to work on a farm in Ohio. These are the people Health and Human Services selected that we know of. Supposedly 85% of children are sent to family members here in the United States, but what about the rest? What about the fifteen hundred lost?

Health and Human Services and the government as a whole must take the responsibility for this. There is no one else to blame when they are the ones determining where to place children. They need to reevaluate their policy, fine-tune whatever their process is, and ensure this never happens again.

They need to be able to account for every child and they should be held accountable.

Some have pointed out that the children may be in the hands of family members who are afraid of speaking with the current government due to its feeling towards immigrants right now. While that's a valid argument I still don't think that it is okay to just say "the government is iffy right now, it's okay if we don't know where these kids are." Simply excusing it by saying it was just a very basic phone call to check isn't good enough either.

The government should know where these kids are. Should they have a detailed registry? No. But they should have some basic knowledge, one year later, of where these kids are and how they are faring.