HHS Secretary Azar did not say 'zero tolerance' children received a 'great act of American generosity'

Generosity? No, Secretary Azar, this is a disgrace."-voiceover of TV ad for Equity Forward Action , released July 23

Equity Forward, an abortion-rights group, placed what it claimed was a "heavy six-figure" television buy via an affiliate that attacks Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for comments made during an interview on July 10 with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

The group, as part of its HHS Watch project, has increasingly highlighted the department's role in the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy of separating children from families seeking asylum at the U.S. border.

Because of previous court rulings, the Department's Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for placing children with parents if they're available, with other relatives if not, then in licensed programs or "least restrictive" settings if all else fails.

That role has thrust Azar into a high-profile role since a federal judge issued the Trump administration a 30-day deadline - expiring July 26 - to quickly reunite as many separated families as possible.

The ad revolves around this Azar quote from the interview: "It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity what we are doing for unaccompanied kids."

But as we have explained repeatedly to regular readers, beware of snippets of quotes you see in attack ads.

The Facts

The ad opens with stock footage of a chain-link fence and sounds of crying babies. Then it shows families at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center, which is not an HHS facility but a way station for women and children who have been paroled from detention centers while they await an asylum court hearing.

"They are terrified, taken from their mothers and fathers, and detained in cages," the ad's narrator says.

HHS manages 100 shelters in 17 states, where there are currently about 12,000 children. In fiscal year 2017, according to HHS, approximately half of all children were over 14 years of age, and over two-thirds were boys. Virtually all of the children came from three countries experiencing a surge in violence and social conflict: Guatemala (45 percent), El Salvador (27 percent) and Honduras (23 percent).

Two of the 100 shelters are temporary shelters, in Tornillo, Texas, and Homestead, Florida, which were recently expanded after the Trump policy went into effect. An HHS official said that after the migrant crisis in 2014, which overwhelmed HHS facilities, the agency put in place a way to rapidly expand such facilities in response to a huge influx. Tornillo, for instance, has been used in the past as a shelter for hurricane survivors.

The Tornillo facility can hold as many as 450 children, and the Homestead facility has a capacity of 1,350. As of July 23, about 1,500 children are in both facilities.

The court order covers 2,551 children (out of the total of 12,000) who may have been separated from parents, who are in shelters across the country. It's unclear how many of the zero-tolerance children are in the temporary influx shelters at Homestead and Tornillo.

The ad notes that Azar is "now in charge" and shows him saying: "It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity what we are doing for unaccompanied kids." Images flash of the Tornillo and Homestead facilities, depicting gates and beds in a row. The narrator intones that "this is a disgrace" and urges viewers to call Congress and hold Azar accountable.

The clear implication is that Azar was saying the treatment of children under the zero-tolerance policy was an act of generosity. But, in fact, he made this statement in the context of explaining to Blitzer that it was difficult to let television crews into the facilities because of privacy concerns.

Here is the relevant portion of the interview:

Azar: "Wolf, our mission is protect child welfare. I'm sorry if it doesn't work for a TV camera angle. I'm sorry. At the end of the day, these are minor children, if they're in our custody, we are going to look out for their welfare and treat them with the respect, the privacy that they deserve. And we'll be as transparent as possible, consistent with that."

Blitzer:"They deserve that privacy. I'm just saying, we would guarantee that they would blur their faces. No one would see the kids' faces. We just want to go in and do our job. If there is nothing to hide, I don't see what the problem would be."

Azar: "Wolf, we are happy to work, we want to be transparent. We have nothing to hide about how we operate these facilities, our grantees. It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity what we are doing for unaccompanied kids who are smuggled into our country or come across illegally. So, we don't have anything to hide about it. We just have to protect privacy. We'll be happy to work with you to see if there are ways to accommodate that. It is not about hiding it. It's about how do we fulfill our mission of reuniting the kids that are under this court order first. How do we protect their privacy and how do we protect our grantees as they do their work."

Earlier in the interview, Azar said: "I've got 12,029 kids in our custody right now, and the vast, vast majority, close to 10,000 of them, were sent by their parents or escaped from their parents to come to this country alone. Some of them came in this country illegally and were separated at the border. Some long ago. Some as part of zero-tolerance. And, Wolf, what we do is we provide as caring an environment. They get education. They're getting athletics. They're getting entertainment. They get medical care, dental care, mental health care, vision care. They're getting snacks."

As of July 23, HHS told the court that it had reunited or "appropriately discharged" 1,187 of the 2,551 children ages 5 and older, with a total of 1,634 possibly eligible for reunification; the government also has reunited 57 out of 103 children who are under the age of 5, with 46 found to be ineligible because parents were already deported, were found to have serious criminal history or other reasons.

Equity Forward officials defended the use of the quote in the ad, saying it was justified given that the interview was scheduled to explain HHS's response to the court order.

"To be clear, Azar did this interview to discuss his agency's compliance with a court order on the 'zero tolerance' policy," said Mary Alice Carter, executive director of Equity Forward. "CNN did not invite him on to discuss the history HHS has with placing kids with foster care. If he gets to claim that all of the locations have kids that are 'happy' and 'getting snacks' we need to highlight the fact that some of these facilities are tents on military bases behind massive fence enclosures."

The Pinocchio Test

Azar, in explaining HHS's response to a policy that spurred controversy, might have been advised to chose language that could not so easily be snipped for an attack ad. But that still does not excuse Equity Forward's juxtaposition of images and language.

At the Fact Checker, we have a "reasonable person" standard and believe most viewers would conclude from the ad that he said the treatment of immigrant children under the zero-tolerance policy was a great act of "American generosity and charity." Instead, he was talking more broadly about the agency's treatment of children at 100 facilities across the country. Equity Forward earns Three Pinocchios.

Three Pinocchios

An award-winning journalism career spanning nearly three decades, Glenn Kessler has covered foreign policy, economic policy, the White House, Congress, politics, airline safety and Wall Street. He was The Washington Post's chief State Department reporter for nine years, traveling around the world with three different Secretaries of State. Before that, he covered tax and budget policy for The Washington Post and also served as the newspaper's national business editor. Kessler has long specialized in digging beyond the conventional wisdom, such as when he earned a "laurel" from the Columbia Journalism Review