Progressive United States Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has hit back against Donald Trump after the president criticised her and renewed his attacks on the Somali community in Minnesota.
During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Trump embarked on a racist tirade, describing Omar and other Somali immigrants as “garbage” and calling for them to leave the US.
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“His obsession with me is creepy,” Omar wrote on social media in response. “I hope he gets the help he desperately needs.”
Trump has been ramping up his anti-immigration rhetoric in recent weeks, particularly after the deadly shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, DC, last month.
The suspect in the shooting is an Afghan man who was evacuated from the country in 2021, after the withdrawal of US and allied forces. Trump has used the shooting as the basis for tightening immigration from what he described as “third-world countries”, including Somalia.
“We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage,” the US president said.
“These aren’t people that work. These aren’t people that say, ‘Let’s go, come on. Let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing.”
Trump said he does not know Omar “at all” but has watched her complain about the US for years. “I think she’s an incompetent person. She’s a real terrible person,” he said.
A former child refugee who fled Somalia’s long-running civil war, Omar is considered the first Somali American to serve in the US Congress. She represents a congressional district in Minnesota that contains one of the largest Somali diaspora communities in the country.
While Somalis in the US suffer from higher unemployment and poverty rates, akin to other refugee groups, a 2021 Minnesota Chamber of Commerce Report highlighted the community’s contributions and a trend towards upward mobility.
“While many Somali refugees arrived with limited education, low workforce participation rates and high poverty levels, their situation two decades later has shifted significantly,” it said.
“Poverty levels have dropped, workforce participation has increased, median household income has ticked up and educational attainment has made marginal gains.”
Trump has nevertheless taken a series of hardline steps in response to the National Guard shooting, including suspending all migration from the “third world” and ordering a review of the status of permanent residents from 19 countries.
The US president — whose first and current wives are immigrants from Eastern Europe — has also been decrying immigration in general as a drain on US resources.
Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community has long been in Trump’s crosshairs.
During his first term in office, for instance, Trump implemented sweeping migration restrictions against five predominantly Muslim countries, plus North Korea and Venezuela. One of the countries swept up in the so-called “Muslim ban” was Somalia.
Recently, Trump has also criticised the Somali community for a COVID-era welfare embezzlement scandal in which dozens of people, including some Somali immigrants, have been charged.
Omar herself has been a years-long target of Trump’s criticisms. He repeatedly berated her and other immigrant politicians for “telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run”.
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump wrote on social media in 2019.
The Trump administration recently launched an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minnesota that appears to be targeting the Somali community.
During the Thanksgiving holiday last week, Trump sparked outcry when he called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded” and accused him of doing nothing to confront Somali gangs allegedly “roving the streets”.
The US president also taunted Omar by appearing to mock her Islamic headscarf, saying that she is always “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab”.
On Tuesday, the progressive group Justice Democrats decried Trump’s attacks on Omar and the Somali community as “disgustingly racist”.
“This is all Trump knows how to do when he has to distract from his own administration’s failures,” Justice Democrats said in a social media post.
“Stoke hate, divide our communities, & send ICE in to terrorize our neighbors. Pathetic.”
