White House denies Donald Trump said Haitian immigrants ‘all have AIDS’
Trump allegedly made the comments during a meeting about immigration
The White House has denied claims that President Donald Trump allegedly said all Haitian immigrants “have AIDS”.
Donald Trump was said to have made the comments during an Oval Office meeting with senior staff about the levels of immigration in June.
According to the New York Times, Trump complained that too many were receiving US visas before making offensive and racist comments.
Six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting claimed Trump began reading aloud from a document given to him by his domestic policy advisor Stephen Miller.
The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the US in 2017. After learning that over 2,000 came from Afghanistan, Trump called the country “terrorist heaven”.
Then, speaking about the 15,000 people from Haiti, Trump said they “all have AIDS”.
Around 40,000 people came from Nigeria and the President reportedly said that once they had seen the US, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.
The White House has now denied that Trump made the comments and called the claims “lies based on anonymous sources.”
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders claimed John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, and Rex Tillerson, the US Secretary of State, were all in the meeting and denied Trump made the comments.
She said: “General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, 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 these lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway.”