Donald Trump on Thursday described some of the countries on his travel ban list as “hellholes” before reviving a harsh insult he had used privately during his first term.
At a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump singled out three nations—one in the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Africa—as deserving of the jab.
“I’ve also announced a permanent pause on third-world migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries,” Trump, 79, said.
“I didn’t say s—hole. You did,” he then added after someone in the crowd yelled out the derogatory insult.
Trump told lawmakers in 2018 that the U.S. didn’t need more immigrants from “s—hole countries” like Haiti, but Norway instead. He retold that story with pride on Tuesday, adding in Sweden and Denmark.
“Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia—places that are a disaster, right?“ he said. ”Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.”
The Trump administration has heightened scrutiny of immigrants from several countries following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national who came to the U.S. in 2021.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, 54, offered some rationale for the bans in a Fox News interview last week.
“If they don’t have a stable government there, if they don’t have a country that can sustain itself and tell us who those individuals are and help us vet them, why should we allow people from that country to come here to the United States?” she said.
Other countries on the list are Burma, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Cuba, Burundi, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
In addition to the travel ban, the administration has abruptly cancelled some naturalization ceremonies.
“The pause will allow for a comprehensive examination of all pending benefit requests for aliens from the designated high-risk countries,’ a DHS spokesperson told the Daily Beast at the time. “The safety of the American people always come first.”
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