President Donald Trump, at a midyear Oval Office meeting on immigration, reportedly suggested that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS,” according to a New York Times article Saturday.
According to six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting, Trump began reading aloud from a document on immigration, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017, which the president reportedly said made his campaign promise to toughen entry to the U.S. look like it was failing.
More than 2,500 immigrants were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained, according to the report. Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he said, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there, the Times said.
And, 40,000 had come from Nigeria, Trump read, saying that once they had seen the U.S., they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.
The White House denied to the Times that Trump ever used “AIDS” or “huts” to refer to immigrants from any country, and several other people who attended the meeting said that they did not recall the president using such language.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Saturday pushed back hard against the Times report, issuing a statement denying that Trump had made the comments.
In his first year in office, Trump has sought to limit immigration and issued an executive order barring citizens of several Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the U.S. That order has run into legal challenges.
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The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against that ban on Friday, but said that the Trump administration could continue to bar individuals from countries in the Middle East and North Africa from entering the U.S. if they do not have a “bona fide” relationship with someone in the U.S.
Trump has also moved ahead with a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
Trump earlier in December was critical of Democrats’ immigration stance, saying then that their position could be the barrier to government funding agreement.
“They want to have illegal immigrants, in many case, people that we don’t want in our country,” Trump told reporters at the White House. Democrats are seeking relief from deportation for Dreamers, or undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.