Hopes Dim for DACA Deal as Lawmakers Battle Over Trump’s Immigration Remarks<br />The Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, who also attended the meeting, said on “Fox News Sunday”<br />that she did not recall the president “saying that exact phrase.”<br />Mr. Durbin had told reporters on Friday that Mr. Trump called African nations “shitholes,” which Mr. Durbin said was “the exact word used by the president, not just once,<br />but repeatedly.” He called the president’s comments “hate-filled, vile and racist.” At the meeting, Mr. Durbin said Mr. Trump also questioned whether the United States needed more Haitians.<br />“I didn’t hear that word either,” Mr. Cotton said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”<br />“And I was sitting no further away from Donald Trump than Dick Durbin was.”<br />Mr. Cotton said Mr. Durbin “has a history of misrepresenting what happens in White House meetings,” an assertion<br />that Mr. Perdue made in his own interview Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week.”<br />Ben Marter, a spokesman for Mr. Durbin, responded by suggesting that Mr. Perdue and Mr. Cotton should not be believed.<br />Mr. Perdue and another Republican senator at the meeting, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, had previously said they did “not recall the president saying these comments specifically.”<br />But by Sunday, their recollections appeared to have sharpened, and Mr. Cotton joined Mr. Perdue in disputing Mr. Durbin’s account.<br />The senator, David Perdue of Georgia, also accused another participant in the White House meeting, Senator Richard<br />J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, of a “gross misrepresentation” of what the president had said at the session.
