'Leave My Husband Alone,' Chao Tells Student Protesters

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was targeted by protesters when he left an event at Georgetown University on Monday night—but his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, was there to stick up for him. "Why don't you just leave my husband alone?" Chao said to protesters who approached the couple as they left a building on campus and prepared to get into a vehicle. "Why are you separating families?" asked the student protesters, who played audio of distressed migrant children who had been separated from their parents at the border. Video of the confrontation posted on Twitter shows Chao pointing her finger at the protesters.

'I'm not trying to disrespect you, but why is he separating families?" one young man says to Chao. "He is not," says Chao, who repeatedly tells the protesters to leave her husband alone before she enters the vehicle. The transportation secretary, who came to the US as an immigrant from Taiwan when she was eight years old, did not respond to shouts of "How can you sleep at night?" Roberto, the Georgetown student who posted the video, tweeted Tuesday his parents are Mexican immigrants, and he "was infuriated that a man who blocked the Dream Act and a Trump cabinet official were invited to my campus," Fox reports. (More Elaine Chao stories.)