Masai Ujiri, who is the president of the NBA team Toronto Raptors, also criticized President Donald Trump for the offending comments he gave during the Oval Office meeting intended to find a bipartisan solution on the immigrant issue with the DACA program. Namely, Trump said that immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations came from “shithole countries.”
Ujiri took Trump’s comments personally due to the fact the he was born in Nigeria. He told the Toronto Star that he is “proud” of where he came from and that “there are no shitholes anywhere.”
“We’re proud, everybody’s put in different situations, but we’re proud of where we came from. My wife is from Guinea and Sierra Leone; she just came back from Sierra Leone. My dad is from Nigeria. My mom is from Kenya. I consider myself to be a son of Africa and a person of the world, and I want to raise my kids [to know] that there are no shitholes anywhere. There’s no shitholes anywhere in this world because we were born in different places for a reason,” he added.
The Hill reports that in the past Ujiri quietly fumed over Trump’s comments about immigrants, such as when he reportedly said that Haitians who came the U.S. “all had AIDS,” and that Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” if granted entry to the U.S. But now, the “shithole” comment finally prompted Ujiri to speak out, according to the Star.
The White House previously denied all reports of Trump making offensive and racist comments, but after The Washington Post broke this story, the White House kept silent, not denying the president’s “shithole countries” comment.
On Friday, Trump took to Twitter to deny saying those words, claiming that he merely used “tough” language in the meeting. After writing his tweet, several lawmakers who were present at the meeting confirmed that the offensive remarks were made by the president.
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