Eight days after President Donald Trump told four freshmen congresswomen to “go back” to the “crime-infested” countries they came from, he’s again pushing the women into the media spotlight with another Twitter message, this time calling them “racist.”
“The ‘Squad’ is a very Racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced, and not very smart,” Trump said on Twitter Monday. “They are pulling the once great Democrat Party far left, and were against humanitarian aid at the Border…And are now against ICE and Homeland Security. So bad for our Country!”
Although Trump doesn’t name the Democrats he’s referencing in the most recent message, congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan are known colloquially as “the Squad.”
They are the same women Trump told on Twitter to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
All of the women are U.S. citizens. Omar, a Muslim woman, immigrated to the U.S. as a child refugee from Somali. Pressley is a Black woman. Tlaib is the first Muslim woman to preside over the House floor, and Ocasio-Cortez is Hispanic, according to CNN.
Tlaib said on Monday at the NAACP annual convention in Detroit, “I’m not going nowhere, not until I impeach this President.”
Tlaib has been protesting Trump since at least 2016, when she is seen on video being ushered out of a Trump rally while shouting, “You guys are crazy.”
Twitter user Ryan Knight summarized the 11-second video clip with these words: “In this video of @RashidaTlaib protesting at a Trump rally in 2016, you can hear Trump supporters screaming at her to ‘get a job.’ She got a job alright…as one of the fiercest Democrats in Congress!”
Omar’s name has come up in headlines more frequently than the other women’s after a crowd at a July 17 Trump campaign rally shouted “send her back” about the congresswoman in Greenville, N.C.
In response, she quoted activist and poet Maya Angelou in a pinned tweet that same day:
“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.”
Pressley pinned a Twitter message to Trump July 14. In it, she said: “THIS is what racism looks like. WE are what democracy looks like. And we’re not going anywhere. Except back to DC to fight for the families you marginalize and vilify everyday.”
Ocasio-Cortez responded directly to one of Trump’s tweets saying he doesn’t “believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country.”
Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter Sunday she is fighting to guarantee health care, public college and student loan forgiveness, environmental protection, living wages and basic human rights without taking “a dime of corporate money.”
She added the president has jacked up drug prices, hurt immigrant kids and appointed U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to scam student loans.
Ocasio-Cortez also spoke out about the president’s recent Twitter messages at an immigration town hall Saturday in Queens, New York.
“Once you start telling American citizens to quote go back to your own countries, this tells you that this president’s policies are not about immigration,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It’s about ethnicity and racism.”
She said she knows this is what Trump has been thinking the entire time but that it won’t stop her.
“We’re going to stay right here,” she said at the town hall. “That’s where we’re going to go.”We’re not going anywhere.”
