Corey Lewandowski Tries and Fails to Defend ‘Womp Womp’

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski on Wednesday morning defended his on-air response with the phrase “womp womp” to a story of a 10-year-old with Down Syndrome being separated from her mother and detained by authorities. “Lots of Fake News today,” Lewandowski tweeted. “I mocked a liberal who attempted to politicize children as opposed to discussing the real issue which is fixing a broken immigration system. It’s offenseive [sic] that the MSM doesn’t want to talk about the fact these policies were started under Obama.” Although it is technically true that a few families were separated under Obama, NBC News notes in a fact-check, there are vast differences in scale—and that the Obama administration never had a distinct separation policy for accompanied minors. “There were occasionally instances where you would find a separated family—maybe like one every six months to a year—and that was usually because there had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn’t actually the parent,” the director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School told NBC. “There were not 2,000 kids in two months,” she added. “It’s not the same universe.”