Somalia-born US lawmaker Ilhan Omar has tweeted “I am where I belong” after supporters of President Donald Trump chanted “send her back” at a rally on Wednesday evening.
The chants began after Mr Trump mentioned her name during his speech.
👋🏽 I am where I belong, at the people’s house and you’re just gonna have to deal! pic.twitter.com/W0OvDXGxQX
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) July 18, 2019
This comes after a row erupted over a series of tweets the president posted last week about four congresswomen who had criticised his immigration policies.
“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” he wrote.
Out of the four women, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, three were born in the United States.
Ms Omar also posted lines from Maya Angelou’s defiant poem Still I Rise:
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.-Maya Angelou https://t.co/46jcXSXF0B
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) July 18, 2019
Ms Omar, 37, is the first Somali-American, first African-born American, and one of the first two Muslim American women to serve in the US Congress.
She was born the youngest of seven siblings in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, in 1981. Her mother died when she was two years old.
Raised by her father and grandfather, the family fled the country during the Somali Civil War and spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp before moving to the US in 1995. BBC News
