Ilhan Omar cheered as she returns to Minnesota district
U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar returned to Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport on Thursday to cheers, one day after a crowd at President Trump’s rally chanted “send her back” when he singled the Minnesota Democrat out for criticism. Omar is holding a previously scheduled town hall on Medicare on Thursday night with Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington.
“Welcome home Ilhan!” the crowd cheered when Omar walked into the airport. Omar retweeted video of her arrival and wrote “home sweet home!!”
Omar, who was first elected to Congress in November, is one of four progressive freshmen congresswomen of color known as “The Squad,” who first publicly disagreed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by refusing to vote for a $4.6 billion border bill. The internal Democratic Party fight subsided Sunday when Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter the four women should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
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Omar, a Somali refugee who became a naturalized American citizen, is the only one of the four women who was not born in the U.S. At a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, Mr. Trump singled her out, falsely claiming she blamed the U.S. for terrorist attacks. The crowd responded with chants of “send her back.”
After Mr. Trump and the crowd were widely criticized, Mr. Trump claimed Thursday he was “not happy” with the chant, although he did nothing to stop it during the rally.
Omar’s immediate response Wednesday night was with a pair of tweets, first writing, “I am where I belong, at the people’s house, and you’re just gonna have to deal!” She then tweeted a Maya Angelou poem that read: “You may shoot me with your words / You may cut me with your eyes / You may kill me with your hatefulness / But still, like air, I’ll rise.”
Omar told reporters Thursday that immigrants like her are as American as everyone else in the country, CBS Minnesota reported.
“We are where we belong,” she said. “I told people on my election night, in the great state of Minnesota, we don’t just welcome refugees, we send them to represent us in Washington. As much as [Trump is] spewing his fascist ideology on stage, telling you as citizens to go back because they don’t agree with his detrimental policies for our country, we tell people that here in the U.S the sense is patriotic, here in the U.S. disagreement is welcome, debate is welcome, and especially in the people’s house, all of our voices are uplifted.”
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