US President Donald Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

"Why are we having all these people from sh..hole countries come here?" Trump said at the Thursday (Friday NZ time) meeting, according to the sources, referring to African countries and Haiti.

He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met yesterday.

EVAN VUCCI/AP US President Donald Trump at a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy in the White House on Wednesday.

The comments left lawmakers taken aback, according to people familiar with their reactions. Republican senator Lindsey Graham and Democratic senator Richard Durbin proposed cutting the visa lottery programme by 50 per cent and then prioritising countries already in the system, a White House official said.

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Asked about the account, White House spokesman Raj Shah said "certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people".

Shah went on to list the White House's demands for an agreement that would protect undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country as children and stressed that the president favours merit-based immigration.

Trump was reported in December to have made similarly disparaging comments last year about people who had received US visas in 2017. He said that people from Haiti "all have AIDS" while people from Nigeria would never "go back to their huts", the New York Times said.

Outlining a potential bipartisan deal, the lawmakers discussed restoring protections for countries that have been removed from the temporary protected status programme while adding US$1.5 billion (NZ$2b) for a border wall and making changes to the visa lottery system.

The administration announced earlier this week that it was removing the protection for El Salvador.

Trump had seemed amenable to a deal earlier in the day during phone calls, aides said, but shifted his position in the meeting and did not seem interested.

Graham and Durbin thought they would be meeting with Trump alone and were surprised to find immigration hard-liners such as Republican representative Bob Goodlatte and Senator Tom Cotton at the meeting.

The meeting was impromptu and came after phone calls on Thursday morning, Capitol Hill aides said.

After the meeting, Marc Short, Trump's legislative aide, said the White House was nowhere near a bipartisan deal on immigration.

"We still think we can get there," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at the White House press briefing.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who wasn't in the meeting, in a tweet called the president's remarks "breathtakingly offensive".

"Worse, it's ignorant of American ideals."

Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said in a tweet he would like "a more detailed explanation regarding the President's comments".

"Part of what makes America so special is that we welcome the best and brightest in the world, regardless of their country of origin."

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- Washington Post, with Bloomberg