THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Throwing all the kids into a Trump Camp is plenty bad optics for a man like The Tangerine Shitgibbon who relies on show to obscure his total lack of substance. Therefore all his bloviating about border security is meaningless if those kids can just walk away.

A 15-year-old migrant boy who was housed in a large shelter near the southern tip of Texas walked off its premises on Saturday and disappeared into the borderland, officials said.

The shelter, a former Walmart in Brownsville, Tex., that was repurposed as the largest migrant child care center in the country, has come under intense scrutiny as children who were separated from their parents under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy began being housed there.

On Sunday, the nonprofit group Southwest Key Programs, which operates the center known as Casa Padre, confirmed that the teenager was missing.

The news of a teenager’s departure came as company officials sought to reassure members of Congress and the news media who had toured the center that the roughly 1,500 boys living there, aged 10 to 17, were well cared for and closely monitored.

A spokesman for Southwest Key, Jeff Eller, said on Sunday it could not legally require children to stay on the premises if they sought to leave, and that “from time to time” children had left several of its 27 shelters for immigrant children.

“We are not a detention center,” Mr. Eller said in a statement. “We talk to them and try to get them to stay. If they leave the property, we call law enforcement.”

Federal officials echoed that position, saying they could not stop a child who attempted to leave. The officials did not respond to a question about how many children had walked away from migrant centers nationwide.

Mr. Eller said that less than 1 percent of all of the children who have come through Southwest Key’s centers have left, though he declined to provide specific numbers.

The revelation that children can leave such centers on their own raised a host of questions about the shelter system: What happens to their immigration proceedings; how family members can reunite; whether they can sidestep the lengthy process of being approved for release to a parent or sponsor; and who is responsible for their safety, especially in an area like the Rio Grande Valley, one of the busiest corridors for human trafficking.

The incompetence of the Trump administration is already legendary, but this adds a special shine to it. And once again everything we are told by the administration is proven to be a lie in the time it takes to sleep on it. We can only hope the kids find a safe haven until they can be freely reunited with their families.