Trump slams Nigerians for not returning to their 'huts' after seeing America

"General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen, and all other ranking staff very the gathering deny these absurd cases and it's both tragic and telling the New York Times would print the lies of their unknown "sources" in any case", Sanders said.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, denied on Saturday morning that Mr. Trump had made derogatory statements about immigrants during the meeting.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied the reports Saturday morning, though she didn't deny how the Times described the the overall goal of the meeting.

They "all have AIDS" the commander in chief allegedly said about the 15,000 Haitian visas. Kelly and Miller blamed Tillerson "for the influx of foreigners", the Times wrote.

The White House Saturday strongly denied a report in The New York Times that claims that President Donald Trump, during private meetings about immigration this past summer, had made insulting remarks about people migrating to the United States from Haiti and Nigeria.

In an Oval Office meeting in July, the sources said, Trump read from a list in his hand during a discussion about immigrants who had been granted to enter the country.

The report comes on the heels of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling Friday that Trump's travel ban, the third he has proposed since becoming president, is illegal. The explosive and disparaging remarks about immigrants attributed to the president were sourced to a pair of unnamed officials, one who the Times said was present in the meeting, and another who was briefed about the comments by a second attendee. Forty-thousand Nigerians who had entered the country would never "go back to their huts", the president said, two sources told The Times.

They further noted that "the meeting in June reflects Mr. Trump's visceral approach to an issue that defined his campaign and has indelibly shaped the first year of his presidency". "He's come into office with an aggressive strategy of trying to reverse the demographic changes underway in America".

The claim was contained in a report by the New York Times.

"Two people who described the comments found them so noteworthy that they related them to others at the time, well predating [White House] pushback", Haberman said.