During a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Trump launched a racist attack on Omar and other Somali immigrants, calling them “trash” and calling on them to leave the United States.
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“His obsession with me is scary,” Omar wrote on social media in response. “I hope he gets the help he so desperately needs.”
Trump has been intensifying his anti-immigration rhetoric in recent weeks, especially after the fatal shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, DC, last month.
The suspect in the shooting is an Afghan man who was deported from the country following the withdrawal of US and allied forces in 2021. Trump has used the shootings as a basis for tightening immigration from what he describes as “third world countries”, including Somalia.
The US President said, “If we keep bringing trash into our country, we are going down the wrong path. Ilhan Omar is trash. She is trash. Her friends are trash.”
“These are not the people who do the work. These are not the people who say, ‘Come on, let’s go. Let’s make this place great.’ These are the people who do nothing except complaining. They complain, and they got nothing from where they came from.”
Trump said he did not know Omar “at all” but that he had seen him complain about America over the years. He said, “I think he’s an incompetent person. He’s really a horrible person.”
Omar, a former child refugee who fled Somalia’s long-running civil war, is believed to be the first Somali American to serve in the US Congress. She represents a congressional district in Minnesota that has one of the largest Somali immigrant communities in the country.
While Somalis in the US suffer from high unemployment and poverty rates similar to other refugee groups, a 2021 Minnesota Chamber of Commerce report highlighted the community’s contributions and upward mobility trend.
It says, “Although many Somali refugees arrived with limited education, low workforce participation rates, and high poverty levels, their situation has changed significantly two decades later.”
“Poverty levels have fallen, workforce participation has increased, median household income has increased and there have been modest gains in educational attainment.”
Yet Trump has taken several drastic steps in response to the National Guard shootings, including suspending all immigration from the “Third World” and ordering a review of the status of permanent residents of 19 countries.
The US president – whose first and current wives are immigrants from Eastern Europe – has also generally condemned immigration as a waste of American resources.
Minnesota’s large Somali community has long been a target of Trump.
For example, during his first term, Trump implemented sweeping immigration sanctions against five Muslim-majority countries, as well as North Korea and Venezuela. One of the countries included in the so-called “Muslim ban” was Somalia.
Recently, Trump has also criticized 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 the target of Trump’s criticism for years. He repeatedly scolded him and other immigrant politicians for “telling the people of the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, the United States, how to run our government”.
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places they came from,” Trump wrote on social media in 2019.
The Trump administration recently launched an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minnesota that appears to target the Somali community.
Last week during the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump caused an uproar when he called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded” and accused him of doing nothing to combat the Somali gangs allegedly “roaming the streets.”
The US President also mocked Omar’s Islamic headscarf, saying that she is “always wrapped in her hijab”.
On Tuesday, the progressive group Justice Democrats described Trump’s attacks on Omar and the Somali community as “disgustingly racist.”
“Trump knows exactly what to do when he needs to, distracting attention from his administration’s failures,” the Justice Democrats said in a social media post.
“Spread hate, divide our communities, and send ICE to terrorize our neighbors. Pathetic.”
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