Facing strong condemnation at home and abroad, U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday denied using the word “shithole” to describe Haiti and African countries, but kept up criticism of a Senate immigration plan that he said would force the United States to admit people from countries that “are doing badly.”
Trump reportedly made the remarks at a White House meeting on immigration on Thursday. U.S. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who attended the gathering, told reporters on Friday that Trump used “vile, vulgar” language, including repeatedly using the word “shithole” when speaking about African countries.
The Republican president’s comments were decried as racist by African and Haitian politicians, by the United Nations human rights office and by U.S. lawmakers from both major parties.
Trump, who has been accused of racism over several issues since he took office a year ago, sought to walk back the comments on Friday, saying on Twitter, “The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used.”
Trump also denied saying “anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country.”
According to two sources, at Thursday’s meeting Trump questioned why the United States would want to accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations, referring to some as “shithole countries.”
While many Republican lawmakers stayed quiet on Trump’s remarks, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, called them “unfortunate” and “unhelpful,” noting in an interview on CNN that his family had emigrated to the United States from Ireland to help build the nation’s railroads.
At an event on Friday at the White House, Trump honored the memory of Martin Luther King Jr, the civil-rights era activist who was slain in 1968. King’s memory is marked with a national holiday, which falls this year on Monday.
Trump stood beside Isaac Newton Farris, King’s nephew, while a group of about 20 African-American supporters and members of his administration were on hand in the Roosevelt Room, including Ben Carson, his Housing and Urban Development secretary. He ignored reporters who shouted questions about his remarks.
A group of Republican and Democratic senators has been working for months to craft legislation that would protect 700,000 young adults who were brought into the country illegally as children and later shielded from deportation under a program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
In a series of tweets on Friday, Trump also suggested that momentum toward a deal on maintaining such protection had stalled. “The so-called bipartisan DACA deal presented yesterday to myself and a group of Republican Senators and Congressmen was a big step backwards,” he said.
I am so tired of this, the reason Africa as a whole have some poverty is directly do to colonization. On top of that, the abduction of millions of Africans for the slave trade. Afterwards and to this day the Europeans still have a hand in Africa’s finances. It’s time to kick all Europeans, Asians, Arabs out of Africa the so-called sh#thole. No one has respect for the Africans and we don’t have it for ourselves either. Kick all invaders out as well as the children of our colonizers, let’s close our borders. Let’s start over and only trade with other Africans regardless of cultural differences in ethnic groups. Theirs more than enough Africans to make the whole continent rich with just us.WE ARE ONE, WE HAVE NO FRIENDS, BUT OURSELVES!!!