A crying little girl whose image was blasted all over the Internet as a symbol of the Trump (and Obama) administration’s harsh family separation policy was never separated from her mother at the southern border. They are currently detained together in McAllen, Tex, where the mom has applied for asylum.

“The moving photo was used by the liberal media and far left activists to pummel the Trump administration for its decision to start strictly enforcing immigration laws at the border,” Gateway Pundit explained.

But wait, there’s more.

From the Washington Post:

“But the girl’s father told The Washington Post on Thursday night that his child and her mother were not separated, and a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman confirmed that the family was not separated while in the agency’s custody.”

The Daily Mail reports the mom left three children behind in Honduras and also was deported from the U.S. in July 2013 according to ICE. Reentry after deportation is a felony.

“[The husband] said that [his wife] set out on the 1,800-mile journey with the baby girl on June 3, at 6 am, and he has not heard from her since…He said he heard from friends that his wife paid $6,000 for a coyote – a term for someone who smuggles people across the border.”

Time nonetheless says that it’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.

President Trump himself is a salesman and obviously not a detail guy, and as such, he is sometimes his own worst enemy with his rhetoric.

But the White House did a really bad job in responding to the outcry about family separation which started when Obama-era images began circulating of kids in cages. The White House must respond much more quickly, effectively, and aggressively in a hostile media environment.

As has been reported, the border patrol only separates unaccompanied minors who have been trafficked to the border by human smugglers. Moreover, the best way for a resident of any country to avoid family separation is to apply for a visa or asylum and thus enter the U.S. legally with the appropriate paperwork.

Although Trump issued an executive order changing the policy, the federal government is still subject to a court order requiring illegal immigrant minors to be released after 20 days, which may create a Catch-22 situation along with more litigation.

So is the actual end game for open-borders advocates to enable  the release of adults and children into the country (and the likelihood — based on past practice — that many adults will blow off their court hearing?).

From the Washington Examiner:

“What do you think will happen under the administration once the families are released and the parents are caught later because they didn’t show up for their court date, as happens, by some estimates, in about 40 percent of immigration-related court orders? What happens when detention facilities are stuffed beyond capacity because the families now can’t be split?”

While there is obvious human suffering in Central America, as talk show host Howie Carr has noted, this appears to be more manufactured outrage over a fake or pre-existing crisis, in this case for the purpose of open-borders advocacy by the mainstream news media and blue-check Twitter.

Although Trump is often criticized for being divisive, what about the divisiveness created by the press and social media who throw around terms like racist and bigot for anyone who disagrees with their faulty narrative?

According to a new Rasmussen poll, 54 percent of likely U.S. voters (including 56 percent of independents) put the onus on parents rather than the feds for family separation in the context of illegal entry into America.

How long before the media moves on to the next controversy du jour? With that in mind, regardless of your political ideology, if any, is often to best to be skeptical until all the facts emerge.

Recall that we’ve been told that the world is coming to end because of Trump’s tweets about little rocket man, in the alternative when Trump sat down for peace talks with Kim Jong Un, when Congress passed the Trump tax cuts, when Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, when he exited the Iran Nuclear Deal, when so-called net neutrality was repealed, and the list goes on.

We’re still here and the U.S. economy seems to be thriving, which benefits all American citizens and legal residents.

By the way, remember when the world almost came unglued when Trump allegedly described some developing countries as sh*tholes? Are the champions of open borders arguing that the U.S. should refrain from enforcing immigration law because many of those countries are indeed sh*tholes?