Ilhan Omar has been welcomed back to her home city of Minneapolis by huge crowds after spending the last week on the receiving end of racist attacks from Donald Trump.
Supporters greeted the congresswoman at Minnesota airport on Thursday, chanting “Welcome home Ilhan” as she stepped into the arrivals hall.
Retweeting a video of the homecoming, Omar said in a tweet: “It’s good to be home.”
Omar is one of four Democratic congresswomen targeted by Trump in tweets telling them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”.
The row escalated on Wednesday when the president rounded on them by name, criticising Omar along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.
When Trump spoke about Omar – who was born in Somalia and moved to the US as a refugee when she was a child – the crowd responded with chants of “send her back”.
The president later claimed he tried to stop the chants despite video evidence he did no such thing.
The chilling incident prompted a global outpouring of support for Omar. In the UK almost 14,000 people signed a letter of solidarity.
The congresswoman herself responded by quoting Maya Angelou poem Still I Rise, and later tweeting: “I am where I belong, at the people’s house and you’re just gonna have to deal!”
Such was the scale of the backlash that even staunch Trump defender, Piers Morgan, penned a column calling the racist chants “the most sickening moment of his presidency”.
Trump has repeatedly defended his comments about the congresswomen, tweeting recently: “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!”
However, the Democratic-led US House of Representatives disagreed, voting earlier this week to brand the words as “racist comments”, the Press Association reports.
Theresa May’s official spokesman said: “I don’t know if the Prime Minister has seen it but as I said earlier in the week the president’s comments in respect of the congresswomen were completely unacceptable and that remains the case.”
The Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs and deputy leader Simon Coveney said he found Trump’s comments “chilling”.
Coveney tweeted the video of the rally, saying: “This is chilling … targeting individuals, fuelling hatred based on race is not acceptable in political discourse … history tells us where this leads!”