What Did Trump Say at Immigration Meeting?

What exactly did President Donald Trump say at a Jan. 11 White House meeting on immigration?

At the meeting, Lindsey Graham, a Republican, presented a bipartisan plan to remove the threat of deportation for the 689,800 people who were illegally brought to the United States as children and afforded protection under an Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which Trump is phasing out. A day after the meeting, Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat and co-author of the plan with Graham, claimed Trump used an obscenity to describe African nations and made disparaging remarks about Haitian immigrants.

Durbin quoted the president as saying of African nations, “‘Those shitholes send us the people that they don’t want.'” Durbin continued, “He repeated that. He didn’t say that just one time.” Durbin also quoted Trump as saying, “‘We don’t need more Haitians.'”

After the meeting, Graham reportedly told his fellow Republican senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott, that the media reports about Trump’s language at the meeting were “basically accurate,” according to Charleston’s Post and Courier.

Trump issued a vague denial. In a Jan. 12 tweet, : “The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used,” without explaining which remarks he denied making or what exactly he said at the meeting. Talking to reporters in Florida two days later, of the remarks that Durbin “totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting.”