Last week, reports came out asserting that during a meeting on immigration policy at the White House, the president had referred to nations including El Salvador, Haiti, and some African countries as “shithole countries.” What so set the president off was the presentation of a plan from Sens. Lindsay Graham and Dick Durbin for the overall number of immigrants accepted to the U.S. to be slashed while prospective immigrants from the aforementioned countries would be given preference for the remaining slots.
Unsurprisingly, the reports attracted a significant outpouring of condemnation from quite literally around the world, including from interests as high level as the very United Nations.
Now, 2012 Republican presidential nominee and possible soon-to-be U.S. Senate candidate Mitt Romney has offered his thoughts about the matter, condemning the president as so many others have done.
On Monday — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — Romney took to Twitter to slam the president’s reported remarks as completely “antithetical” to everything that it should mean to be president of the United States.
He wrote:
‘The poverty of an aspiring immigrant’s nation of origin is as irrelevant as their race. The sentiment attributed to POTUS is inconsistent w/ America’s history and antithetical to American values. May our memory of Dr. King buoy our hope for unity, greatness, & “charity for all.”’
Trump, to be sure, did offer a halfhearted denial of the reports about the specific language he used while maintaining that he had in fact, been “tough.”
The press reports about the language he used were backed up by meeting participant Sen. Dick Durbin, while fellow meeting participant and Trump opponent turned shill Sen. Lindsay Graham declined to specifically say one way or the other whether or not the president used the language in question.
Other Republican participants in the meeting — Republican Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue — insisted in Sunday talk show appearances that they hadn’t heard the president use the alleged language.
Even still, this issue isn’t even where the problems with the president’s perspectives on immigration end.
After coming into office promising to deport every undocumented person in the U.S. and finding that he couldn’t just dispatch death squads to do his dirty work, his administration moved, among other things, to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA program.
This program protects hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children from the threat of deportation, and its the fate of those currently protected by the program that prompted last Thursday’s negotiating meeting.
While national leaders have been slogging it out in D.C., a federal judge ordered the federal government to temporarily resume accepting renewal applications for DACA protections from undocumented immigrants, saying that the Trump administration’s decision to stop doing so was “arbitrary” and “capricious.”
Through all of this, the president has maintained that it’s the Democrats who are to blame for the absence of an official deal covering what to do with the remnants of the DACA program.
Check out Twitter’s response to Mitt Romney below. There has been talk of him making a run for the Utah U.S. Senate seat soon to be vacated by Orrin Hatch.
Featured Image via Drew Angerer/ Getty Images
