Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Monday condemned Republican members of Congress for “spineless complicity” in their responses to President Trump tweeting that she and three other Democratic congresswomen of color should “go back” to their home countries.
“For hours, we waited for a single Republican in Congress to condemn Trump’s brazenly racist comments, but all we heard was a deafening silence — complicity,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in an email to supporters.
{mosads}”Not a single Republican in Congress unequivocally disavowed Trump telling four American Congresswoman to go back to their countries, displaying tacit approval for Trump’s naked racism,” she added.
President Trump on Sunday tweeted about an unnamed group of progressive congresswomen “who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”
In the tweets, which seemed to be directed at Ocasio-Cortez and Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the president said they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
All four of the freshman congresswomen are U.S. citizens, and only Omar, who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia, was born outside the U.S.
The comments have widely been condemned by the Democratic Party as racist.
Rep. Will Hurd (Texas), the only black Republican in the House, was the first member of his party to call the president’s tweets “racist” and “xenophobic.”
“The four women he is referring to are actually citizens of the United States, three of the four were born here,” Hurd said on CNN early Monday. “It’s also behavior that’s unbecoming of the leader of the free world.”
Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) later in the day also called the tweets racist.
Turner and Hurd are the only members of their party so far to call the tweets racist. While a growing number of Republicans have condemned the remarks, the rest have stopped short of calling them racist, instead casting them as unreflective of American values.
Ocasio-Cortez highlighted the response of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who said on “Fox & Friends” that the congresswomen Trump attacked “hate our own country.”
“Republicans aren’t just refusing to condemn Trump’s assault on immigrants in all forms — they’re doubling down on them,” the New York lawmaker wrote.