President Donald Trump on Sunday assailed a group of Democratic congresswomen of colour as foreign-born troublemakers who should go back to the “broken and crime infested places from which they came,” ignoring the fact that the women are American citizens and all but one was born in the U.S.
Trump’s tweets prompted a wave of searing condemnation from Democrats, including those from Michigan who pushed back on Twitter, and Arab Americans from Metro Detroit who characterized the remarks as unsettling and unseemly.
He claimed the women “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe”, before suggesting they “go back”.
Democratic Representative from Michigan Rashida Tlaib (C) reacts during her testimony as Democratic Representative from New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (L) and Democratic Representative from Massachusetts Ayanna Pressley (R) comfort her during a hearing of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on ‘The Trump Administration’s Child Separation Policy: Substantiated Allegations of Mistreatment’ in the Rayburn House Office Building at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, USA, 12 July 2019. EPA-EFE/ERIK S. LESSER
The tweet is directed towards a group of four congresswomen of colour; three were born and raised in the US, while the fourth moved to the US as a child. The women – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar, who came to the US as a refugee aged 12 – have all called the president racist and have been backed by members of the Democratic Party.
Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx in New York, a few kilometres away from the Queens hospital where Trump himself was born.
