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Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used a congressional trip to Ghana to make nice in public — and throw a jab at President Trump.
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“They said ‘Send her back’ but Speaker @SpeakerPelosi didn’t just make arrangements to send me back, she went back with me,” Omar wrote on Instagram, under a photo of the two holding hands at a monument memorializing the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
“So grateful for the honor to return to Mother Africa with the @TheBlackCaucus and commemorate The Year of Return!”
READ: “We are not frightened”: Ilhan Omar gets hero’s welcome in Minnesota
The two women traveled with Georgia Democratic congressman John Lewis and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus to observe the 400th anniversary of the American slave trade.
Omar’s caption is a dig at Trump, who tweeted in July that Omar and three other congresswomen of color — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) — should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Omar immigrated to the U.S. from Somalia as a refugee when she was 12 and is a naturalized citizen. The other three were born in the U.S.
Those congresswomen, known as “The Squad,” have since become routine punching bags for Trump, both online and at rallies.
At a July 17 rally in North Carolina, the crowd erupted into chants of “send her back.” The remarks were directed at Omar, who immigrated to the U.S. from Somalia as a refugee over 20 years ago and is a naturalized citizen.
READ: Ilhan Omar and AOC are punching back at Trump’s “fascist rhetoric”
Members of The Squad have also been subject to criticism by their own party leadership, including Pelosi.
In early July, Pelosi disparaged Omar and her colleagues in an interview with The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. The group, Pelosi said, “have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
But Pelosi appears to be doing damage control on those relationships.
Just last week, Pelosi held a private 30-minute meeting with Ocasio-Cortez, with whom the speaker has also shared an uneasy public relationship. In an interview with the Washington Post last month, the freshman rep from said Pelosi’s remarks felt like “persistent singling out.”
After tweeting out a photo of herself and Ocasio-Cortez in the speaker’s office Friday, Pelosi, speaking at a press conference, called the New York Democrat a “very gracious member of Congress.”
In a tweet sent on Tuesday, Pelosi referred to her trip with Omar as “deeply transformative.”
“We saw the horrors of slavery & humbly walked through the ‘Door of Return’ w/a renewed sense of purpose to fight injustice & inequality everywhere,” she wrote.
Cover: Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of the delegation lead by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, looks on Ghana’s Parliament in Accra, Ghana, Wednesday, July 31, 2019. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in Ghana as the head of a Congressional delegation to address Ghana’s lawmakers on Wednesday. While in Ghana, Pelosi and other members of the U.S. Congress plan discussions on “regional security, sustainable and inclusive development and the challenges of tomorrow including the climate crisis.” (AP Photo/Christian Thompson)
