"It's scary that he's so obsessed with me. I hope he gets the help he so desperately needs," Ilhan Omar wrote on social media.
The post came shortly after Trump was asked at a cabinet meeting about a fraud case involving Somalis in Omar's home state of Minnesota. His response was marked by xenophobia, according to several media reports.
At a crossroads
They don't contribute anything. I don't want them in our country," the president said of the state's large Somali population , according to The Washington Post, adding that "there's a reason their country is no good, their country stinks."
Trump further claimed that the United States is at a crossroads and that things will go badly if "we continue to accept garbage."
Ilhan Omar is a piece of trash... Her friends are trash.
Omar, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2018, fled the war in her home country and came to the United States as a teenager. She became a U.S. citizen 25 years ago.
Un-American?
Trump's remarks come as his administration is reported to be conducting raids on undocumented Somalis in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul twin cities. The president has accused Somali gangs, without evidence, of "terrorizing" people in Minnesota.
Melvin Carter, mayor of Saint Paul, dismisses Trump's attack.
"This idea that we take an entire country, declare an entire people guilty of crimes committed by a few individuals is astonishingly un-American," he told CNN .
Donald Trump has been criticized for racist rhetoric, both now and during his first term in office. When he called a number of African countries "shitholes," among other things.
