WASHINGTON D.C. — Amidst reports that Health and Human Services has lost track of nearly 1,500 unaccompanied migrant minors, White House officials have insisted the number is less horrifying if, like President Trump, you think of migrants as “animals”.

After officially referring to members of the gang MS-13 as “animals” and calling for ICE to separate illegally immigrating parents from their children, The Trump White House has assured Americans that also picturing missing migrant children as animals will make hearing the news much easier.

“1,475 missing children is terrible,” Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters, “but like 1,475 missing dogs is like ‘is that a lot of missing dogs, even? Maybe that many dogs go missing all the time?’ That’s why we’re demanding that you report about these missing immigrant children as if they were literal dogs.”

“Or what if 1,475 coyotes disappeared, that’d actually be good news,” Huckabee Sanders spitballed, before quickly announcing that Trump plans to annex New Brunswick.

Trump-friendly media outlets have applauded the president’s move to brand missing foreign children as “animals”. Fox And Friends Steve Doocy explained, “At first I felt really bad about almost 1,500 human children getting ripped away from their parents and possibly taken by human traffickers. But then I pictured them all as chinchillas, and I was like, ‘Aw, adorable’!”

The Trump Administration has announced further plans to expand the use of the word “animals” to include all references to immigrants. This will include officially changing the Federal Department’s name to “US Citizenship and Animal Services”, referring in speeches to “illegal animal-gration”, and changing the name of Led Zeppelin’s classic to “The Animal Song”.

Back at the US border, armed ICE officials have implemented a presidential executive order and are placing fuzzy animal ears on the heads of soon-to-be-lost migrant children, in order to aid Americans in picturing them as less than human.

In a related story President Trump has reportedly become confused and conflated two upcoming executive orders: one labelling missing migrant children as “animals”; the other lifting Obama-era restrictions on hunting protected wildlife.