White House denies report that Trump said Haitian immigrants ‘all have AIDS’

The White House firmly denied a New York Times report on Saturday claiming that President Trump said that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS,” among other inflammatory comments.

The Times reported that Trump lashed out at top aides and Cabinet officials in a June meeting in which he bemoaned the influx of immigrants despite his travel ban on Muslim-majority countries, which he said damaged the credibility of his vow to secure the border.

“General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen 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 the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement to the newspaper.

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Six officials who attended or had knowledge of the meeting told the Times that Trump read from a list of the latest statistics on immigration since taking office in January.

Trump took issue with several nationalities of immigrants, including the 40,000 immigrants from Nigeria who he said would not “go back to their huts” once entering the U.S., two unnamed officials told the newspaper.

Of the two officials, one was reportedly present in the meeting, who briefed the other. The other officials recalled the Oval Office episode but said they did not remember the president using the words “huts” or “AIDS,” according to the Times, which conducted over three dozen interviews for its report.

White House chief of staff John Kelly and senior aide Stephen Miller, who provided Trump with the list of immigration numbers, reportedly turned on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, blaming him for issuing many of the visas that allowed immigrants into the country. 

Trump has issued three separate bans on migration into the U.S. from several nations with ties to terrorism in an effort to mitigate the threat of domestic attacks, though each order has been tied up in federal courts.