A photo of two immigrant girls inside a chain link enclosure has been in the news for the past few weeks.

Liberals and Trump critics, such as Jim Carrey, blamed the photo on Trump's 100% prosecution policy. This prosecutes anyone crossing the border illegally with little or no previous offenses. The photo goes with a report by Health and Human Services lost track of almost 1,500 unaccompanied children.

It is easy for liberals to blame both on the Trump administration. They have a point. It is senseless to separate families at the border.

Here's the problem.

That photo was from 2014 from an Arizona facility before Trump was even the Republican nominee. Of course, this gave Trump and his supporters fuel to add to their Obama-hating fire. The report of 1,500 children was not new either. It came from October and December of 2017, before Jeff Sessions' zero-tolerance 100% prosecution policy was enacted.

Those 1,500, or 1,475 to be exact, "missing" children aren't actually missing. To be considered unaccompanied, children must have crossed the border without a parent or legal guardian. If there isn't already a parent or guardian living in the United States, the children must be placed with a sponsor while undergoing immigration hearings.

After a 30-day check-in phone call, sponsors either didn't answer or couldn't be reached by federal authorities, so they were marked as "unaccounted for." It's possible that sponsors who are also illegal aliens don't want to answer out of fear of being deported.

Just because these children aren't missing doesn't mean we have nothing to worry about. You know the saying, "What you don't know won't hurt you"? That isn't necessarily true here.

It's possible these children could have been placed with human traffickers or members of gangs, putting them in even more danger than at the border. That's what happened in 2014 when eight unaccompanied minors from Guatemala were placed by Health and Human Services with human traffickers operating under an egg farm in Marion, Ohio.

The children were forced to work for 12 hours a day for seven days a week for more than a year without the United States knowing.

If the children's' work wasn't up to par, they were threatened with physical harm and the deaths of their families and themselves.

Problems from the Obama administration don't take the Trump administration off the hook.

A Customs and Border Protection official reported that 658 children had been separated from their parents at the border between May 6 to May 19 as a result of the 100% prosecution policy.

That doesn't include the hundreds of children separated from their parents since October, before the policy became a reality.

We can't believe everything we hear in today's polarized America. We can't blow things out of proportion until we know all the facts. However, we also can't stay silent when it comes to the safety of children.