Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is standing behind her comments that she did not hear President Donald Trump use the word "s***hole" during last week's contentious Oval Office meeting concerning a bipartisan proposal for a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
"I have no problem repeating what I've said," Nielsen, who was at the meeting, told "CBS This Morning" co-host John Dickerson in an interview airing Tuesday.
"I just don't – I don't – that's – I don't – that's not a word that I remember being used."
Nielsen made the comment after Dickerson asked her what she would say to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., if he asks her about her comments while she appears before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about oversight of her department.
Durbin, a committee member, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., were at the Oval Office meeting last Thursday to present their bipartisan DACA plan. After the meeting, Durbin said he had heard Trump use the phrase to describe Haiti and African nations.
Nielsen, in Tuesday's interview, said the Oval Office meeting was "very impassioned."
"People on all sides feel very strongly about this issue, frankly, as well as they should," she told Dickerson. "There were a lot of conversations happening at the same time. It's not a particular phrase that I heard."
During the meeting, the president had made a "broad characterization" about people coming from Haiti and African countries, rather than from Norway, and Nielsen said that Norway was specified because Trump had just met with the country's prime minister, Erna Solberg.
"He had just met with the prime minister of Norway, and was very impressed with what she told him about successes that Norway has experienced," said Nielsen. "He was just using that as an example of a place that accepts immigrants in part based on merit."
She added that she does hope that DACA is worked out, but even if it's not, Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agency will not "prioritize their removal."
"I've said that before," said Nielsen. "That's not the policy of DHS. If you are a DACA that's compliant with your registration, meaning you haven't committed a crime, and you in fact are registered, you're not priority of enforcement for ICE should the program end."
That, she continued, would be "in perpetuity. That, of course, that means you can't commit a crime."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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