According to six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting, Mr. Trump then began reading aloud from the document, 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.
More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained. Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.
Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, 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.
Sarah Sanders issued a statement blasting the paper and denying that Trump had made the comments.
“General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen, and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims and it’s both sad and telling the New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway,” Sanders said.
Konathan Jayes-Green, co-creator of UndocuBlack Network, a group of black immigrant community organizers commented:
“I am disgusted but not surprised … it’s consistent with the racist, anti-black, queerphobic xenophobe Donald J Trump truly is. It was evident from his decision to end TPS [temporary protected status] for Haiti that he’s both willingly ignorant of who Haitian immigrants are and deeply committed to ending migration of Black and Brown immigrants to this country.
The Trump administration’s 2018 budget proposes cutting $800 million in America’s bilateral HIV/AIDS programs.
