On Tuesday, President Donald Trump called Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., “trash” and said Somalis should “go back to where they came from.”
“I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you, that’s fine. Someone will say, ‘Oh, that’s not politically correct.’
“I can say the same thing about other countries, too,” he added, as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sat nearby. In a social media post Monday night, Noem said, “I recommend a total travel ban on all the damn countries that have been flooding our nation with murderers, leeches, and welfare junkies.” A source familiar with the plan said today that about 30 countries will be on that list.
Trump, however, focused most of his ire on Somalia and Omar.
“In Somalia, which is barely a country, they don’t have, they don’t have anything. They just go around killing each other. There is no structure,” he said before turning to Omar, a progressive Democrat and Somali American whom he has mocked and attacked for years.
“I always watch her,” Trump said, saying she “hates everyone. And I think she’s an incompetent person. She’s a really terrible person.”
Omar has served in Congress since 2019.
Trump later called her “trash. Her friends are trash. They’re not people who work. They’re not people who say, ‘Come on, come on, let’s make this place a great place.'” “They are people who do nothing but complain.”
“You know, if they came from paradise and said, ‘This is not paradise,’ but when they come from hell and complain and do nothing but complain, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” he added.
A representative for Omar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s comments come as a top law enforcement official told NBC News that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is planning an operation in Minneapolis-St. Paul area this week. The official said ICE agents are not specifically targeting the Somali community, but may be arresting some Somalis who violate immigration laws.
The planned operation was first reported by The New York Times.
The president’s comments on Somalia came at the end of the public portion of a more than two-hour Cabinet meeting when a reporter asked him whether Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz should resign over fraud related to Covid relief funds in the state.
The New York Times reported that 59 people have been convicted of criminal charges related to fraud schemes in recent years, and most are of East African descent. In total, the scams raised more than $1 billion in taxpayer money.
Trump said: “The Somalis bilked that state out of billions of dollars, billions, every year, billions of dollars, and they don’t contribute anything.”
Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate, said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that scammers are going to jail and that “demonizing an entire community for the actions of a few is lazy.”
There are an estimated 80,000 Somalis in Minnesota, and Walz said Trump is “demonizing an entire group of people who came here fleeing the civil war and created a vibrant community that makes Minnesota and this country better. But that’s Donald Trump: deflecting, demonizing, not finding solutions. He’s not going to help fix anything about fraud.”
In his comments Tuesday, Trump called Walz “a grossly incompetent man. Something is wrong with him.”
