Trump vague on caged kids

US President Donald Trump has told Republican lawmakers he backs their efforts to craft an immigration solution that ends the politically toxic practice of separating families on the US/Mexico border.

Just hours after doubling down on his administration’s much-derided policy that triggers separation of migrant children from their parents, Trump braved frustrated and in some cases angry fellow Republicans to assure he wanted their swift resolution to the crisis.

While top officials have stood by Trump’s zero-tolerance approach, insisting children are being held in humane conditions, criticism has swelled from international rights groups, Christian evangelicals, former US first ladies and the president’s own Republican Party.

Democrats who have visited minors in detention in Texas and California, describe crying children held in cage-like conditions behind chain-link fencing, with no idea when they will see their parents again.

An audio recording purported to feature Central American children separated from their parents sobbing and wailing has also struck a nerve.

With emotions running high, a handful of House Democrats protested against the Trump meeting, yelling out at Trump in a rare face-to-face demonstration against a president by sitting members of Congress.

“Quit separating the kids!” Juan Vargas, a Democrat from southern California, shouted as Trump left the meeting.

“Mr President, don’t you have kids?”

Republican lawmakers emerged from the 45-minute huddle energised that Trump was giving his backing to legislation that House leaders expect to bring to a vote this week.

It contains several of Trump’s main priorities, including border wall funding, protecting young “Dreamer” immigrants who were brought to the country as children and curbs on legal immigration programmes such as an end to the visa lottery.

House Republican Mario Diaz-Balart said the priority of ending the separations had been slotted into a compromise bill currently under consideration and favoured by GOP moderates.

“Not only does he support the compromise bill, but he backs it all the way,” Diaz-Balart said of Trump.

But even after the meeting, it was unclear whether Trump favoured that bill over a more hardline measure supported by conservatives.

White House spokesman Raj Shah said Trump had endorsed both House immigration bills during the meeting, adding that they “solve the border crisis and family separation issue by allowing for family detention and removal”.

“I’m with you 100%,” Trump said, according to Shah.

Several Republicans have said the more conservative plan is doomed, and that Trump’s address was helpful in unifying the divided caucus.

On Tuesday evening, protesters heckled US homeland security chief Kirstjen Nielsen as she dined at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.

They chanted “shame!” repeatedly at the woman who has become the frontline defender of the practice of taking children from their parents.

Earlier in the day, a defiant Trump sounded unfazed by the mounting pressure to alleviate the situation before it ruptures into a public relations disaster for his party.

“I don’t want children taken away from parents,” he told a gathering of small business owners, before adding: “When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally, which should happen, you have to take the children away.”

The United Nations has slammed the separation practice as unconscionable, while Amnesty International blasted it as nothing short of torture.

Mexico condemned it as cruel and inhuman.

British Prime Minster Theresa May said images of children being held in cages were deeply disturbing and she would press Trump on the issue.

- AFP