President Donald Trump escalated his anti-immigration rhetoric on Tuesday, calling Somali immigrants “trash” and saying they should leave the United States, remarks that drew a swift rebuke from Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who said his fixation on her is “disturbing.”
Speaking during a cabinet meeting, Trump said, “If we keep letting ‘trash’ into our country, we’re going down the wrong path. Ilhan Omar is trash… Her friends are trash,” adding that such immigrants “don’t work” and “just complain.” He tied his comments to recent calls for tougher restrictions following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan man who arrived in 2021 amid the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan.
Omar, the first Somali-born woman elected to the U.S. House and Minnesota’s representative, responded on social media: “His obsession with me is disturbing. He urgently needs help. I hope he gets it.”
Omar was born in Somalia, fled civil war as a child, spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp, arrived in the U.S. in 1995 and became a citizen in 2000. Trump has repeatedly targeted the Minnesota lawmaker while pushing for tighter limits on immigration from what he describes as “third-world countries.”