‘You have killed Americans’: Ilhan Omar tries to shout down Trump’s immigration attacks
(CNN) — For the first hour of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday, Democrats in the House chamber largely stuck to their plan: Sit in stony, defiant silence.
But once Trump began to level attacks on immigrants, that strategy went out the window.
Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib repeatedly yelled at Trump, objecting to his characterization of Minnesota’s Somali community as “pirates” and accusing him of enabling the deaths of US citizens through his hardline immigration crackdown in the state.
The back-and-forth crested after Trump told Democrats in the chamber they “should be ashamed” for refusing to stand and applaud in response to his declaration that the government’s primary duty is “to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”
“You have killed Americans,” Omar, a Somali American who represents a Minnesota district, shouted multiple times at Trump, before gesturing at him and adding, “You should be ashamed.”
The outburst prompted Trump to retort by accusing Democrats of cheating in elections, asserting without evidence that “they want to cheat.”
“They have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat,” he said, eliciting another round of jeers from Democratic lawmakers. “These people are crazy. I’m telling you, they’re crazy.”
Trump officials seized on Omar and Tlaib’s interruptions in the aftermath of the speech, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy calling them “incredibly distracting.”
“Even if you don’t agree with [Trump], you should respect him enough to listen to him,” Duffy said on CNN.
Pressed on the episode during a separate CNN interview, Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi downplayed it as “hardly noticeable in the room.”
“I don’t think there was much, shall we say, departure from what the leader had guided us to do,” the former House speaker said.
Democratic leaders in the lead-up to the speech had repeatedly warned their members not to react to Trump’s rhetoric or make themselves the center of attention, fearing a repeat of last year, when several Democrats used signs or other props to protest the president.
Instead, dozens of Democrats opted to skip the address altogether. And outside of Rep. Al Green — whose one-man protest in the event’s opening moments got him immediately escorted out of the chamber for a second consecutive year — those who did attend spent the first part of Trump’s speech doing little more than shaking their heads in disagreement.
But as the president leaned into his more divisive policies, including his immigration crackdown that led to the fatal shootings of two US citizens in Minnesota, the protestations on the Democratic side of the aisle began to grow more audible.
Trump credited his immigration policies with sealing the southern border and rapidly deporting undocumented immigrants on multiple occasions, without mentioning the killings by federal immigration agents of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti last month.
The president raised Omar’s ire in particular when he singled out Minnesota as a “stunning example” of the fraud that he’s alleged with little evidence is running rampant in blue states, blaming the state’s Somali community.
The-CNN-Wire
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