US President Donald Trump Allegedly Associated Haitians With AIDS in Outburst on Immigration
President Donald Trump has several troubling remarks attributed to him during an earlier meeting in June when he reportedly went off after seeing the number of U.S. visas being given out to migrants from several countries.
The current president allegedly offered an off the cuff diagnosis on the 15,000 Haitians who were awarded visas over the earlier half of the year. They "all have AIDS," Trump has apparently remarked, according to sources quoted by a New York Times report.
He would not stop there, according to the two officials who were familiar with the meeting in June. Trump would reportedly go on to add that 40,000 of the Nigerian travelers would never "go back to their huts" in their native country in Africa, a quote that the White House now firmly denies, according to the Washington Examiner.
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The administration calls the New York Times' account of what happened in the Oval Office meeting in June as a set of "outrageous claims," as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the report.
"Gen. Kelly, Gen. McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen, and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims," she said, listing off the current chief of Staff, the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Homeland Security in turn.
"It's both sad and telling The New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous 'sources' anyway," Sanders added.
The statement from the White House did not deny the entire description of the meeting, as the New York Times points out. Trump was reportedly enraged all the while that then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Secretary Tillerson tried to emphasize that many of these visa holders were just visiting the country for a short period of time.
This report comes at a time that the current administration has taken an increasingly adverse stance on legal immigration, as it dropped the DACA program earlier this year.
