Former President Donald Trump made a baseless claim that thousands of Haitian migrants flocking to the US border at Mexico ‘probably have AIDS’, in his latest controversial comment.
Calling in to his pal Sean Hannity’s show with Fox News on Thursday night, Trump spoke of the surge in Haitian migrants seeking refuge, saying the onslaught is a ‘death wish for our country’.
Last month, tens of thousands of migrants, mostly from Haiti, set up camps in a Texas border town. Upwards of 6,000 migrants were flown back to Haiti and some returned to Mexico as US Homeland Security officials tried to gain control of the situation.
While bringing up Trump’s immigration policy and the ‘big beautiful wall’ the president hoped to build, Hannity claimed being ‘pro-immigration’.
The primetime host then asked the former president if people entering the country should be subjected to a coronavirus test and a ‘health check’, in addition to a security check.
‘So we have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem. AIDS is a step beyond. AIDS is a real problem,’ Trump claimed.
Recent wave of migrants at the US-Mexico border
- Nearly 15,000 mostly Haitian migrants flocked to the US-Mexico border last month. While some had open asylum cases in Mexico, many had grown tired of waiting.
- US authorities spent a week clearing migrants from the camp, located on a Texas border town, Del Rio.
- Some migrants were deported directly to Haiti while others were released into the US with the expectation they would appear before immigration officials at a later date.
- Some of these migrants chose to go back to Mexico last month.
- On Wednesday, Mexico sent a plane with 129 Haitian migrants back to Port au Prince. It’s unclear if all those returning to Haiti are doing so voluntarily.
‘So hundreds of thousands of people are coming into our country that if you look at the stats, if you look at the numbers, if you look at – just take a look at what’s happening in Haiti, a tremendous problem with AIDS.’
It wasn’t the first time Trump has made derogatory comments about Haiti. He infamously once referred to Haiti as a ‘s***hole country’ during a meeting with bipartisan senators at the White House in 2018.
‘Many of those people will probably have AIDS and they’re coming into our country and we don’t do anything about it,’ Trump continued on Thursday. ‘We let everybody come in. Sean, it’s like a death wish. It’s like a death wish for our country.’
Trump also claimed without any proof that ’50 countries’ are ’emptying their prisons’ and sending those inmates to the US, the Daily Mail reported.
‘I hear it’s 50 countries, they’re emptying out their prisons into the United States,’ the ex-president said.
‘Some of the toughest people on Earth are being dumped into the United States because they don’t want them. So these people that are the roughest prisoners there are anywhere are being dumped into the United States for us to take care of them.’
According to the former president, ‘hundreds of thousands of people’ were pouring in every two weeks.
Border Patrol agents encountered nearly 28,000 Haitian migrants along the US-Mexico border in fiscal year 2021, which ended September 30, compared to the same time period in 2020 when the number was 4,395.
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