An insight into the polarised US political climate that led to President Trump's controversial migrant child separation policy has been offered by two Republican politicians.
1 NEWS reporter Katie Bradford spoke with two Hawaiian State representative Republican politicians while in the island US State today, as part of her Jefferson Fellowship Grant.
The two members of the Hawaii House of Representatives, Bob McDermott and Gene Ward, defended Trump's highly controversial efforts to secure the US-Mexican border - a practice that has generated protests in New Zealand.
"The issue is you have floods of people coming, right. You have these unaccompanied children, 80 per cent of them are unaccompanied, little girls being given the morning after pill and birth control for their thousand mile journey because they're going to be victimised and raped," Mr McDermott said.
"Where are the parents in all this, and why are these children flooding across our border? It doesn't happen in New Zealand because they've got to swim but they just walk over here and we can't afford it anymore, so Trump's saying stop, it's gotta stop."
Yesterday, President Trump ordered to stop separating migrant children from their parents, but there were no clear plan to reunite families, despite growing signs the administration is dialing back its "zero tolerance" policy on those entering the US illegally.
Immigrants who remained locked up and separated from their families struggled to get in touch with children being held in many cases hundreds of miles away. Some parents said they didn't even know where their children were.
A senior Trump administration official said that about 500 of the more than 2,300 children taken from their families at the border in recent weeks have been reunited since May.
The separation practice has even generated protests in New Zealand, but Mr Ward denied it should be a source for embarrassment for the Trump administration he supports.
"Well when you hear kids crying it's embarrassing obviously but as I said earlier this has been going on with the Obama administration, with the Bush administration," Mr Ward said.
"It's only now that you the media finally discover it's something you should be paying attention to."
The pair of Hawaiian Republicans also suggested New Zealand may be exempt from President Trump's trade tariffs, and expressed hope the US would one day rejoin the TPP.
* Katie Bradford was in Hawaii as part of a programme run by the Hawaii-based East West Centre, through the Asia NZ Foundation.
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