The real immigration crisis isn’t “missing” children. It’s family separations.

Thousands of Twitter users spent the weekend asking #WhereAreTheChildren?

The viral hashtag sprang up in response to a now widely shared New York Times article noting that the federal government had been unable to make contact with 1,475 unaccompanied minors awaiting deportation hearings.

First things first: Despite reports to the contrary, those children are not “missing” or “misplaced.”

Immigration experts point out that these children are not in government custody, nor are they supposed to be. Instead, this is a population of minors who arrived at the US border unaccompanied by parents or adults, were then detained by immigration authorities, and then were largely released into the care of parents and other close relatives.

The government recently tried to reach about 7,600 of these children with a single phone call each. In 1,475 cases, those phone calls went unanswered — the so-called “missing.”