Rick Santorum suggested that refugee children were unlikely to be traumatized by jailing and the forced separation from their parents at the border because they had already experienced hardship on their journey.

The former Republican senator defended the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy that had ripped apart thousands of immigrant families — some of whom may never be reunited — as less cruel than many Americans believe.

ADVERTISEMENT

“There’s no doubt it’s blown up to a human crisis and the media has reported on that in many ways,” Santorum told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota. “But the media doesn’t report on the human crisis of these children coming to the border themselves.”

The conservative commentator suggested those children had essentially been immunized from trauma by their life experience before reaching the U.S. border.

“The fact is that most of these folks are coming from Central America, not Mexico, and they made a 2,000-mile journey through Mexico,” Santorum said. “They had to cross the Mexican border, which is no picnic, so the idea that putting these children in detention is the worst thing that’s happened to them since they made this long trek, I’m not sure that is necessarily the case. These kids have been traumatized a lot over the past several months in getting here.”