JANUARY 12, 2018 – President Donald Trump questioned senators in an Oval Office meeting Thursday on why the U.S. accepts immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador and African nations rather than places like Norway, according to three people briefed on the conversation.
The White House didn’t dispute the quotations. Asked about the account, White House spokesman Raj Shah said “certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people.”
Trump made the comments in a meeting with lawmakers who suggested restoring protections for people from those countries as part of a broader bipartisan agreement on immigration issues, the three people said. The Washington Post first reported Trump’s remarks.
Shah went on to list the White House’s demands for an agreement that would protect undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country as children and stressed that the president favors merit-based immigration.
The president made the comments on the eve of the eighth anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, killing as many as 300,000 people. On Thursday, Haitian President Jovenel Moise demanded a meeting with the top American diplomat in the country, Charge d’Affaires Robin Diallo, according to State Department officials. Moise was expected to lodge a formal protest. Michele Sison has been confirmed as the new U.S. ambassador, but has not yet arrived.
The officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a diplomatic matter, are concerned that the episode may provoke protests in Haiti because commemorations have been planned to mark the anniversary.
In the U.S., strong criticism followed initial reports of the Oval Office episode, with most though not all of it coming from Democrats.
Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who wasn’t in the meeting, in a tweet called the president’s remarks, “Breathtakingly offensive. Worse, it’s ignorant of American ideals.”
The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Democratic Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, said the president’s statement “reinforces the concerns that we hear every day, that the President’s slogan Make America Great Again is really code for Make America White Again.’ ”
In the strongest reaction from a Republican, Representative Mia Love of Utah, a child of Haitian immigrants, demanded an apology and said the president’s remarks were “unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values.”
“My parents,” Love said, “came from one of those countries but proudly took an oath of allegiance to the United States and took on the responsibilities of everything that being a citizen comes with.”
Senators Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, and Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, were among the lawmakers who met with Trump at the White House to present a deal that a small group of lawmakers had reached on immigration issues.
About a half dozen lawmakers were in the meeting, which also included Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, legislative director Marc Short and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, according to one person briefed on the meeting.
The lawmakers discussed restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries, the Post reported, which for nearly three decades have been granted to help people who are temporarily unable to return to their countries because of armed conflict, disasters or other conditions. The administration announced this week that it would end the protection for people from El Salvador in 2019.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to the Post, which quoted two people briefed on the meeting. Trump then suggested the U.S. should instead accept more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday.
Trump was reported in December to have made similarly disparaging comments last year about people who had received U.S. visas in 2017. He said that people from Haiti “all have AIDS” while people from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts,” the New York Times said.
Shah said in an email that Trump “is fighting for permanent solutions that make our country stronger by welcoming those who can contribute to our society, grow our economy and assimilate into our great nation. He will always reject temporary, weak and dangerous stopgap measures that threaten the lives of hardworking Americans, and undercut immigrants who seek a better life in the United States through a legal pathway.”
