2015 Rashida Tlaib on Donald Trump After Travel Ban Rollout: ‘Deport This Asshole!’

Rashida Tlaib
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Matthew Boyle
Washington, D.C.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), in 2015, called for the deportation of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

In response to Trump rolling out his travel ban idea in December 2015, a version of which he would later successfully implement as president despite legal challenges, Tlaib said on Twitter: “Deport this asshole!”

Trump, like Tlaib, is an American citizen, so deporting either would not be possible. But this tweet carries particular irony now, given Trump’s comments about Tlaib and her fellow members of the so-called “Squad”–Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)–in recent weeks, where President Trump has said in tweets of his own that they should go back to where they came from if they do not like America.

The tweets from Trump–and his doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on them–set off a firestorm in official Washington, with the Democrat-led House of Representatives last week pushing through a resolution condemning Trump as a “racist” in response to them.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was fighting with the “Squad” before the Trump tweets, sided with the freshman socialists against the president and actually violated House rules in a floor speech arguing for the passage of the resolution condemning the president.

The fiasco wherein Pelosi was forced to aid the “Squad” ate up nearly an entire legislative day and forced all members of the Democrat conference in the House to take two votes to clean up her rules violation. Pelosi’s rules violation was the first time in decades–since the 1980s–that a sitting Speaker had their words “taken down” by a member of the minority party. It was also, according to officials present on the House floor, the first time a member of the majority party abandoned the gavel, as Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) did on the floor.

Tlaib’s newly resurfaced comments calling for Trump’s deportation came when he rolled out his plan to ban travel into the United States from a variety of countries known to export terrorists. Trump would later, upon winning the election, in early 2017, roll out executive actions to fulfill that plan to bar travel into the United States from those terror-exporting nations. The Trump plan was challenged in the court system, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban.

Tlaib’s tweet from Dec. 7, 2015, is still live on her official verified Twitter account, and several critics on Tuesday evening have been ripping her for it:

Tlaib, who previously served in the Michigan statehouse as a state representative, was particularly radical even before her election to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. In fact, just this past week video resurfaced from 2016 when she interrupted Trump delivering a speech to the Detroit Economic Club and was escorted out by police officers and security officials. During her exit, she shouted at Trump supporters that they were “crazy.”

UPDATE: 
Another tweet where Tlaib earlier in 2015 called for deportations of Americans has surfaced:

This comes as tweets from Omar have also surfaced from back in 2012 when she called for Americans to be deported, as Breitbart News’ Joel Pollak reports.

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