The Times reported that Trump had met with top aides and Cabinet officials in June meeting to complain about the influx of immigrants despite his travel ban on Muslim-majority countries.
Trump reportedly said during the meeting that failure to stop the immigration flow had damaged the credibility of his promised to voters to secure the border.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement denying the leaked “racist” remarks. “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.”
One of the six officials who attended the meeting allegedly told the Times that Trump made the remarks while he was scrutinizing the list of the latest US statistics on immigration.
Two unnamed sources told the newspaper he had singled out several nationalities of immigrants, including the 40 000 immigrants from Nigeria who he said would not “go back to their huts” once they had entered into the US.
But the officials present said they did not remember the president using the words “huts” or “AIDS,” according to the Times.
Nigeria, the largest country in West Africa, is a huge oil producer but faces major issues regarding its lack of adequate housing.
Lagos, Nigeria’s capital, is Africa’s most populous city, where the majority of people inhabit slums like Otodo Gbame, which translates roughly from the local Egun language to “community in the bush”. They actually do live in makeshift huts, and access to clean water, electricity, schools and other vital services is scarce or nonexistent.
Makeshift huts in Lagos
Moreover, the rich oil industry has buoyed only a few thousand Lagosians into stratospheric wealth while one-fifth of the city’s 21 million residents live in abject poverty, according to a 2016 Oxford University study.
According to an earlier UN Human Settlements Program report, sub-Saharan Africa had the largest percentage of its urban population living in slums or “huts” — about 71 percent.
In the Caribbean, an estimated 150 000 Haitians lived with HIV/AIDS in 2016 (or 2.1 percent of adults aged between 15–49). Haiti has the most overall cases of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean region and its HIV prevelance is rate is among the highest percentage-wise in the western hemisphere.
Trump has issued three separate bans on migration into the US from countries with ties to terrorism in an effort to limit the threat of domestic attacks, but all three orders have been challenged in federal courts.
