Ex-Trump campaign manager mocks 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome separated from her mother at US border

The former campaign manager to Donald Trump has caused anger for mocking the plight of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother at the US border.

Corey Lewandowski made his shocking remarks live on Fox News on Tuesday during a TV debate about the US president’s new policy on immigration, which has seen children taken away from their families.

When Democrat strategist Zac Petkanas began telling the story of the 10-year-old girl, Mr Lewandowski interrupted him, mocking: “Womp womp.”

A visibly disgusted Mr Petkanas picked up on the comment immediately.

He responded: “Did you just say ‘Womp, womp’ to a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome being separated from her mother?”

Mr Petkanas continued: “How dare you, how absolutely dare you sir, how dare you.”

Mr Lewandowski replied: “What I said is you can pick anything you want, the bottom line is clear.”

The former Trump campaign chief was lambasted on social media for his comment.

Twitter users called his remark “inhumane”, “disgusting” and “horrible”.

It is the second time Fox News has run into controversy over the border policy.

Mr Lewandowski’s comments came just a day after presenter Laura Ingraham described detention facilities for children separated from their parents as “essentially summer camps”.

It caused several high-profile faces from the entertainment world to threaten to cut ties with Fox.

Ms Ingraham said: “Since more illegal immigrants are rushing to the border, more kids are being separated from their parents and temporarily being housed in what are essentially summer camps.”

Shortly before her hour-long programme ended, she had apparently had word that there was a social media backlash to her “summer camps” remark. A description of one of the facilities in Texas on Sunday reported hundreds of children waiting in a series of cages created by metal fencing.

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“Apparently there are a lot of people very upset because we referred to some of the detention facilities tonight as essentially like summer camps,” she said.

“The San Diego Union-Tribune today described the facilities as essentially like you would expect at a boarding school. So I will stick to there are some of them like boarding schools.”

Meanwhile, Mr Trump has told Republicans he is “1,000 per cent” behind their rival immigration bills, providing little clear direction for party leaders searching for a way to defuse the escalating controversy over family separations at the southern border.

Republican politicians, increasingly fearful of a voter backlash in November, met Mr Trump for about an hour at the Capitol to try to find a solution that both holds to Mr Trump’s hard-line immigration policy and ends the practice of taking migrant children from parents charged with entering the country illegally.

Many politicians say Mr Trump could simply reverse the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy and keep families together.

While Mr Trump held firm to his tough immigration stance in an earlier appearance on Tuesday, he acknowledged during the closed-door meeting that the coverage of family separations is taking a toll.

Mr Trump said his daughter, Ivanka, had told him the situation with the families looks bad, one politician said.

“He said, ‘Politically, this is bad’,” said Representative Randy Weber. “It’s not about the politics, this is the right thing to do.”

As Mr Trump walked out of the closed-door meeting in the Capitol basement, he was confronted by about a half-dozen House Democrats, who yelled, “Stop separating our families!”

Leaders in both the House and Senate are struggling to shield the party’s politicians from the public outcry over images of children taken from migrant parents and held in cages at the border.

But they are running up against Mr Trump’s shifting views on specifics and his determination, according to advisers, not to look soft on his signature immigration issue, the border wall.

Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader from New York, is adamant that Mr Trump can end the family separations on his own and that legislation is not needed.

Mr Schumer said with most Americans against family separations, it is Republicans “feeling the heat on this issue, and that’s why they’re squirming”.