President’s words spark firestorm
Critics blast Trump over remarks on Haitian, African immigrants
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Friday offered a partial denial in public but privately defended his extraordinary remarks disparaging Haitians and African countries a day earlier.
Trump said he was only expressing what many people think but won’t say about immigrants from economically depressed countries, according to a person who spoke to the president as criticism of his comments ricocheted around the globe.
Trump spent Thursday night making a flurry of calls to friends and outside advisers to judge their reaction to the tempest, said the confidant, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to disclose a private conversation.
Trump wasn’t apologetic about his inflammatory remarks and denied he was racist,
instead, blaming the media for distorting his meaning, the confidant said.
However, critics of the president, including some Republicans, spent Friday blasting the vulgar comments he made behind closed doors. In his meeting with a group of senators, he had questioned why the United States would accept more immigrants from Haiti and “shithole countries” in Africa as he rejected a bipartisan immigration deal, according to one participant and people briefed on the remarkable Oval Office conversation.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the only Democrat in the room, said Trump had indeed said what he was reported to have said.
The remarks, Durbin said, were “vile, hate-filled and clearly racial in their content.” He said Trump used the most vulgar term “more than once.”
The comments revived charges that the president is racist and roiled immigration talks already on tenuous footing.
“The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used,” Trump insisted in a series of Friday morning tweets, pushing back on some depictions of the meeting.
But Trump and his advisers notably did not dispute the most controversial of his remarks — using the word “shithole” to describe African nations and saying he would prefer immigrants from countries like Norway instead.
“If that’s not racism, I don’t know how you can define it,” Florida GOP Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen told WPLG-TV in Miami.
Tweeted Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona: “The words used by the president, as related to me directly following the meeting by those in attendance, were not ‘tough,’ they were abhorrent and repulsive.”
Republican leaders were largely silent, but House Speaker Paul Ryan said the vulgar language was “very unfortunate, unhelpful.”
Trump’s insults — along with his rejection of the bipartisan immigration deal that six senators had drafted — also threatened to further complicate efforts to extend protections for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants, many brought to this country as children and now here illegally.
Trump last year ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that provided protection from deportation along with the ability to work legally in the U.S. He gave Congress until March to come up with a fix.
The three Democratic and three GOP senators who’d struck their proposed deal had worked for months on how to balance those protections with Trump’s demands for border security, an end to a visa lottery aimed at increasing immigrant diversity and limits to immigrants’ ability to sponsor family members to join them in America.
It’s unclear now how a deal might emerge, and failure could lead to a government shutdown.
“The rhetoric just makes it more difficult, and that’s unfortunate,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, a senior House lawmaker. “I don’t think it makes it impossible, but I suspect the Democrats are sitting there goingW, ` hy would we want to compromise with him on anything?’ ”
At a forum Friday at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, Ryan, R-Wis., said, “We just have to get it done.”
Durbin said, “We have seven days and the clock is ticking. Our bipartisan group continues to build support for the only deal in town.”
He said he wants to call the bill to the floor of the Senate early next week.
Lawmakers have until Friday to approve a government-wide stopgap spending bill, and Republicans will need Democratic votes to push the measure through.
But some Democrats have threatened to withhold support unless an immigration pact is forged.
Trump did not respond to shouted questions about his comments as he signed a proclamation Friday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is Monday.
Republican Sens. David Perdue of Georgia and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who both attended the Thursday meeting, said in a statement that they “do not recall the president saying these comments specifically.” What Trump did do, they said, was “call out the imbalance in our current immigration system, which does not protect American workers and our national interest.”
But Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whom Durbin said had voiced objection to Trump’s comments during the meeting, issued a statement that did not dispute the remarks.
“Following comments by the president, I said my piece directly to him yesterday. The president and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel,” Graham said.
The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee say they plan to introduce a censure resolution against Trump over his “bigoted fear mongering” about Haiti and Africa.
Democratic Reps. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana and Jerrold Nadler of New York say the countries Trump insulted “produce immigrants that are remarkable and make significant contributions to our country.”
The censure resolution has little chance of passage in the GOP-controlled House, but Richmond and Nadler said it’s important because “America is a beacon of hope.”