“The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever,” John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, told NPR last week, by way of explaining—or not explaining—what would happen to children who were taken away from their parents at the border. There would be a lot of these children, and very quickly, under a new policy, which Kelly called a “tough deterrent”: all parents who try to cross without papers will be treated as presumptive criminals, and thus as unworthy of having custody of the children they bring with them. That is inhumane enough. But it is all the more a scandal because no one—not the government, not its critics—seems quite sure of “whatever” may mean.

In recent days, the question has led to another one: Did the government “lose” immigrant children, and, if so, which ones? The answer is more complicated than some responses—such as those directed at Ivanka Trump, who cannot seem to shake the misconception that she floats above all political sordidness, after she posted a photograph, amid the furor, of herself holding her youngest child—would suggest. But there is plenty to be angry and alarmed about.

Immigration authorities have long taken custody of children who cross the border as unaccompanied minors, travelling on their own or under the control of smugglers, often in the hopes of being reunited with family in the United States. (They have not, that is, been separated from their parents at the border.) The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, which is a part of the Department of Homeland Security, generally turns them over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The O.R.R. then tries to place the children with “sponsors”: parents, other relatives, or, in some cases, whatever. (There has been at least one case of children being trafficked to work on an egg farm.) The government was supposed to have tightened background checks on sponsors recently, but it is not clear how much has been done.

In a recent Senate hearing on the issue, Steven Wagner, an H.H.S. official, said that, at the end of 2017, the government had tried to follow up with about seven thousand of these children and could not reach nearly fifteen hundred of them. (There are similar numbers from past years, before the new Trump policies were put in place.) This is the source of the statistic, widely circulated, that the government “lost” fifteen hundred children. More accurately, it lost track of them. And many in that particular set of children were likely lost with, not from, their parents or other sponsors who were family members, not with strangers.

But what may be more disturbing than that number is this statement from Wagner’s testimony: “I understand that it has been H.H.S.’s long-standing interpretation of the law that O.R.R. is not legally responsible for children after they are released from O.R.R. care.”

The confusion about which children were among that fifteen hundred has obscured a basic truth: it is a bad thing when children are legally lost in America, with no one clearly accountable. Some immigration advocates may find that the government’s approach—call it vagueness, indifference, negligence, or contempt—has, in the past, worked for individual families who might otherwise be deported. (And the detention centers in which children are otherwise held, as my colleague Jonathan Blitzer has written, are deeply troubled places.) But disappearing—not showing up for immigration hearings, avoiding all authorities, including those designed to protect or to educate—still leaves the long-term outlook for the children highly uncertain. And that is when the sponsors, whom the government has, again, given power over these children, are acting with good will, which may not always be the case.

And the landscape has changed. What had been, at best, a gray area is quickly becoming a dark morass. In early May, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new policy, he said, “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law.” His definition of “smuggling” included travelling with a child of one’s own. That accompanied child would be reclassified as unaccompanied. Since then, there have been wrenching scenes of parents being separated from small children, who do not understand what is happening, by border officials who are not necessarily trained to explain it to anyone—even if they had an explanation that made sense.

In 2014, according to a congressional report released that year, the median age of the unaccompanied minors was sixteen. But, even in the months before the Sessions policy formally went into place, there were reports that a hundred children under the age of four had been taken from their parents, in what amounted to a test run of the new policy, and reclassified as “unaccompanied.” A sixteen-year-old can attest that a would-be sponsor is really, say, an uncle or a cousin. A very young child cannot. In an atmosphere of fear, who will the sponsors be? Or will children just be kept locked up, in detention centers distant from those where their parents are held?

Kelly’s “whatever” defines a space where children are lost track of. Trump Administration officials are acting as if there were a secure system in place for dealing with the children—as if the vast federal bureaucracy that conservatives complain of so much must, naturally, be wrapping them in protective red tape—when there is not. These children don’t even benefit from the safeguards built into regular state and local foster-care systems.

The disconnect was captured in a Senate hearing on May 15th, a week after the new policy was announced, in an exchange between Senator Kamala Harris, of California, and Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. “So your agency will be separating children from their parents,” Harris said.

“No,” Nielsen replied. “What we’ll be doing is prosecuting parents who have broken the law, just as we do every day in the United States of America”—as if the fact of prosecution made a separation something other than a separation.

“I can appreciate that,” Harris said. “But if that parent has a four-year-old child, what do you plan on doing with that child?”

“The child, under law, goes to H.H.S. for care and custody,” Nielsen said.

“They will be separated from their parent. And so my question—”

Nielsen interrupted her: “Just like we do in the United States every day.” They were, in other words, more children of more criminals, who belonged in foster care, or whatever—and who, as far as the Trump Administration is concerned, might as well be lost already, every day in America.