ALISYN CAMEROTA (CO-HOST): This border crisis of children being separated has not gone away. As of this morning, as you and I speak, the latest numbers are that 510 kids are still separated from their parents, and their parents are no longer here in the country. Their parents have been deported. Those kids may never be reunited with their parents, they may never see their parents again. Are you satisfied with this outcome?
RICK SANTORUM (CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR): I think, number one, we're down to, as you mentioned, 500 kids who are separated from their parents, and the vast majority of those are these parents that have been deported. And that sort of leads to the greater question. We have a difficult situation where parents come here illegally and bring their children, and, under the law, we treat them differently, which leads to separation at some point. Even under the previous administration, it led to separation at some point --
CAMEROTA: But they were reunited. Under the previous administration, those kids were reunited --
SANTORUM: Because we didn't deport. That's really the issue, is whether we're going to deport parents and their children. At some point, if people are coming across the border illegally, are we going to treat children and parents differently? And, if we do, that's going to end up with a separation. So, this is sort of the whole question is, if you bring a child here in the United States, you can't get deported? And so, there are bigger policy issues here and I understand that you don't want to create a system of, quote, “deterrence” by separating them, but if you don't have some policy that deals more holistically with this problem, you end up with a system that encourages people to -- as you say, there are actually 700-some kids who are actually still in detention -- in residential settings, but about 200 of them, either the parents have voluntarily given up their parental rights, or the government found that they weren’t proper to reunite.
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CAMEROTA: Our reporting is that those parents, some of whom English is obviously not their native language, didn't know the paperwork that they were being rushed to sign, didn't understand it, it wasn't thoroughly explained to them, didn't know that this would mean they[[ they]] never saw their children again. Nobody spelled that out to them.
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SANTORUM: Most of these people are not from Mexico. Most of these people have actually traversed through the entire length of the country of Mexico to come to this country.
CAMEROTA: Yes, and what does that tell you?
SANTORUM: What it tells you is that these children have been endangered long before they came to this country. And we talk about the endangering of children by what we've done to them. Think of the endangering of children that their parents put them through in bringing them through rather nefarious means in most cases through the entire country of Mexico.
