We talk a lot about right-wing news outlets picking up out-of-context facts and amplifying them in their outrage machine to infuriate and validate their angry audiences.

This phenomenon is not solely the province of the political right.

As we discovered this weekend, when two separate stories about immigration policy morphed into

one hair-raising tale and blew up the Twitter, namely that nearly 1,475 immigrant children

separated from their parents at the Mexican border had been lost by the U.S. government.

It was the stuff of Argentina in the late 1970s, or the Khmer Rouge.

Only the horrifying narrative was a confusion of new episodes and old

and undercut actual tragedy by imagining a far worse one.

Page Austin is an immigration lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Paige, welcome to On the Media.

Thank you.

The wildfire story, as reported, was indeed horrifying.

Almost 1,500 children separated from their parents as they crossed the border and then lost

track of by the government. But it was not as reported.

It was not as reported. There were two different stories being conflated there, and from

my perspective as an immigration attorney, yet a third story being obscured in the process.

Okay, so let's go chronologically through this to see how we got here. yet a third story being obscured in the process.

Okay, so let's go chronologically through this to see how we got here.

In April, an official from the Office of Refugee Resettlement appeared before a Senate subcommittee.

What did that official tell the subcommittee?

That official testified regarding procedures that the Office of Refugee Resettlement has in place to monitor the release of immigrant children in its custody. And in the course of that

testimony, he described efforts over three months in the fall of 2017 to follow up with the

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