The White House is pushing back against a New York Times report that President Donald Trump allegedly made offensive comments about Haitian and Nigerian immigrants.
The Times reported that the president made the racist remarks during an Oval Office meeting with top White House officials in June. He was responding to data on the number of immigrants that had received U.S. visas in 2017, saying that Haitians “all have AIDS” and that Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” once they had seen the U.S.
The White House denied the comments: “General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Saturday. “It’s both sad and telling the New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway.”
But not many are buying her denial given Trump’s background of making racially insensitive comments.
“Unfortunately, it is all too believable that this is how our president speaks behind closed doors because his very public policies have been driven by racism and hatred since Day 1,” Executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Opal Tometi told The Chicago Tribune.
“From his xenophobic Muslim ban to his cruel and immoral treatment of immigrant dreamers, this merely adds crass words to the racist policies this administration has been pushing for a year.”