Trump Warns of ‘Bad People’ Entering From Bahamas After Dorian
Trump said the U.S. should be “very careful” about allowing into the U.S. people from the Bahamas displaced by Hurricane Dorian.
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said the U.S. should be cautious about accepting people from the Bahamas displaced by Hurricane Dorian, saying they could include “some very bad people” including gang members and drug dealers.
“We have to be very careful. Everybody needs totally proper documentation,” Trump told reporters on Monday when asked whether the U.S. is requiring visas for people affected by the storm.
He added: “I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers. So we are going to be very, very strong on that.”
Trump didn’t say how he knew there were gang members and drug dealers among Bahamians seeking to evacuate their storm-ravaged country, and his remarks contradicted the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Mark Morgan, who said less than two hours earlier that Bahamian storm refugees should be granted special immigration status in the U.S.
Morgan addressed the issue after reports that U.S. authorities had forced some people to be removed from a boat leaving the Bahamas because they didn’t have the required visas.
“If your life is in jeopardy and you’re in the Bahamas, and -- and you want to get to the United States, you’re going to be allowed to come to the United States, right, whether you have travel documents or not,” Morgan said at a White House briefing.
On Monday night, the Department of Homeland Security said in a press release that “the U.S. Embassy in Nassau is open for emergency visa appointments and U.S. Customs and Border Protection Ports of Entry are prepared, should Bahamians request to temporarily relocate to the United States.”
His remarks and the DHS statement appeared to extend the confusion over whether people from Barbados require a visa to travel by boat to the U.S.
Morgan said at the briefing that refugees would still undergo background investigations. Anyone deemed a threat would be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Asked if they’d be sent back to the Bahamas, he responded: “No, of course not.”
“We will accept anyone on humanitarian reasons that needs to come here,” Morgan said. “Again, though, if they are deemed to be inadmissible -- for example, if they have a long criminal history and they’ve been denied entering the United States previously, we’re not going to allow that person into the -- the -- the country to roam freely.”
But Trump said that large sections of the Bahamas were not damaged by the storm. “And what we’re doing is bringing the people to those sections of the Bahamas that have not been hit,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”
Some Democrats have said that Trump’s immigration policies are racist. The president has said his proposed restrictions are motivated by safety and economic concerns, not race. The population of the Bahamas is 91% black, according to the CIA, which cites a 2010 estimate.
To contact the reporters on this story: Josh Wingrove in Washington at jwingrove4@bloomberg.net;Justin Sink in Washington at jsink1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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