I understand why the national media is so obsessed over the story of children of illegal immigrants being separated from their parents at the Mexican border.

It’s a heartbreaking sight to see photos of innocent little kids traumatized and crying – even when they were taken in the Obama era. It’s also great TV.

I also get why the Democrats can’t stop using the crying border kids as a political weapon.

It’s the only issue they have left.

The Pelosi Party can’t very well complain about the booming Trump economy, the low-low unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos or the threat of the president starting a war with North Korea.

The Democrats are so desperate they’re still trying to blame President Trump and his mean immigration rules for making the border kids cry.

But the American people know better. In every poll I’ve seen they place the blame squarely where it belongs – on the crying kids’ irresponsible parents.

I really don’t mind that much that the dominant national media keep showing crying kids who are being temporarily separated from their parents.

But I wish the news media – and the politicians of both parties — would spend as much time covering the crying children of America who are taken away from their parents every day and put into our broken and harmful foster care system.

Heartbreaking images of crying little Americans don’t show up on CBS, MSNBC or Facebook. They aren’t championed by politicians of either party. No protestors march on city hall and demand they be returned to their parents.

But at any given time there are about 400,000 American children placed in our horrible government-run foster care system. When they were taken from their abusive or drug-addicted parents’ homes – sometimes in the middle of the night – many of them suffered the same trauma as the border kids.

But half of our foster kids will never be reunited with their parents and only 20 percent will be adopted. Many will grow up being bounced around from foster home to foster home – as many as five, 10 or even 15 times – until they “age out” at 18.

Their stay in foster care hell doesn’t end there.

About 60 percent of foster care kids who age-out end up on the streets, in jail or are quickly recruited by human sex traffickers – many of whom are ex-foster kids.

You never get the tragic, infuriating and decades-old story of our failed foster care system told in the dominant media. All you get are crickets.

Our government foster care system is broken, harmful – and stupid. It takes young innocent children and turns many of them into bad kids and criminals.

Today it has more than 100,000 kids waiting to be adopted. A disproportionate percentage are black.

But government rules and concerns about mixed-race families make it so hard to adopt black children out of foster care that adoptive parents who are white are forced to go overseas.

It’s clear governments don’t know how to take proper care of children. Our foster care system, which proves that every day, should be ended or radically reformed.

But that’s never going to happen until the people who are so deeply concerned about crying immigrant kids at the border show the same sympathy and outrage for the hundreds of thousands of American foster kids who cry off camera.

Unfortunately, when it comes to foster care the people who are always saying “We’ve got to take care of the children” are oblivious or AWOL.

Where is the mainstream media?

Where are the great churches?

Where are the weeping celebrities, politicians and pundits?

Where are the angry protestors?

Where are the black leaders?

Where are President Obama and Maxine Waters?

Do they really care about crying children?

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].