In late November, President Trump put an end to the temporary protected status that had been alloted to Haitian immigrants living in the U.S. after the earthquake had destroyed Haiti. This decision forced 59,000 Haitians in the U.S. to return to Haiti within 18 months or face deportation. The Trump administration claimed that this decision resulted from improved conditions on the island, but Haiti still remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and recent hurricanes have only exacerbated these unfortunate struggles. President Trump, however, has not limited his contempt for Haitians to policy. The New York Times reported in December that Trump had once claimed that Haitians “all have AIDS.”
On January 11th, Trump added to that list by allegedly tagging Haiti as a “shithole” country. The following day, Trump, as always, took to Twitter to claim his innocence, asserting that he hadn’t used those specific words. (Note, he did not deny that he had indeed referred to them in some sense as being inferior, just that he didn’t do so with the specifically alleged words). Yet, Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) claimed otherwise, asserting that Trump had in fact “said these hate-filled things and he said them repeatedly.” Durbin was in the room with Trump when these comments were supposedly made.
Paul Altidor, Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S, explains that the Haitian government, offended and “vehemently” opposing Trump’s comments, formally summoned an American official to explain them. Altidor furthered, “Haitians fought along U.S. soldiers in the Revolutionary War and we continue to be great contributors to American society.”
The Haitian government is not the only entity to speak out against President Trump’s remarks. U.N Human Rights Spokesman Rupert Colville said “There is no other word one can use but racist. You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as ‘shitholes’, whose entire populations are not white, and therefore not welcome.”