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The secretary of Homeland Security says she did not hear President Trump use a vulgarity in an immigration meeting with lawmakers last week. Kirstjen Nielsen testified today at a Senate hearing, and two senators who were in the hearing were also at the immigration meeting in question. Today's hearing got pretty contentious. NPR's Brian Naylor reports.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: Nielsen appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and spent a lot of her time answering questions about the president's language at the White House immigration meeting last week. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont pressed Nielsen about the vulgarity the president was widely reported to have used to describe African nations.
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PATRICK LEAHY: You're under oath. Did President Trump use this word or a substantially similar word to describe certain countries?
KIRSTJEN NIELSEN: I did not hear that word used. No, Sir.
LEAHY: I'm not - that's not the question. Did he use anything similar to that describing certain countries?
NIELSEN: The conversation was very impassioned. I don't dispute that the president was using tough language. Others in the room were also using tough language.
NAYLOR: She didn't elaborate what that tough language was. Trump also reportedly wondered why more people from countries like Norway weren't immigrating to the United States. Nielsen said he was merely referring to a conversation he had just had with Norway's prime minister, who said people in her country were hard-working, not the overwhelmingly white population of the country. In fact Nielsen testified she did not know Norway's racial makeup. Democrats on the panel used the hearing to vent their outrage over the president's comments. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said he was seething with anger.
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CORY BOOKER: When the commander in chief speaks or refuses to speak, those words just don't dissipate like mist in the air. They fester. They become poison. They give license to bigotry and hate in our country.
NAYLOR: Senators also pressed Nielsen about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA under which some 700,000 mostly young people brought to the country illegally by their parents have been allowed to stay. Under an order signed by President Trump, the program ends March 5. Trump has said he wants to extend it but has also tweeted that Democrats aren't serious about getting a deal to extend it. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called the current state of immigration negotiations, quote, "an S-show" and indicated he's been whipsawed by the president's changing positions.
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LINDSEY GRAHAM: Tuesday we had a president that I was proud to golf with, call my friend, who understood immigration had to be bipartisan. You had to have border security. It is essential you have border security with a wall, but he also understood the idea that we had to do it with compassion. Now, I don't know where that guy went. I want him back.
NAYLOR: Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who had previously confirmed Trump's language at last Thursday's meeting, indicated one sticking point in immigration negotiations was the president's insistence that Congress appropriate all the money he wants to build a border wall with Mexico this year rather than spreading the appropriations and construction out over a longer period.
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DICK DURBIN: Is the president realistic when he says he wants 20 billion so he can build the wall in one year?
NIELSEN: I think the president is encouraging us to go as quickly as we can. As you know, it's a very complicated issue - building the wall - for a whole variety of reasons.
NAYLOR: And further complicating the issue - unless a deal is reached on DACA, there's a real possibility the government could shut down on Friday. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.