Haiti condemns Donald Trump’s ‘racist’ Aids comments toward migrants
- ‘So we have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous Aids problem,’ Trump said in a Thursday interview on Fox News
- ‘These vile comments aim only to sow hatred and discord against immigrants,’ the Haitian embassy in Washington said in a statement
Haiti has denounced what it said were “racist” remarks from former US president Donald Trump that migrants from the island nation entering the United States would put Americans at risk of contracting Aids.
“So we have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous Aids problem,” Trump said in a Thursday interview on Fox News.
“Many of those people will probably have Aids, and they’re coming into our country and we don’t do anything about it, we let everybody come in,” he said. “It’s like a death wish for our country.”
According to World Bank data, HIV prevalence in Haiti has been steadily declining for the past 15 years, and is now estimated at a rate of 1.9 per cent among Haitians aged 15 to 49.
The Haitian embassy in Washington condemned the “racist and baseless statement about Haitian migrants, in particular, and the Haitian population, in general, of Donald J Trump.”