The hashtag #IStandWithIlhan began trending after the crowd at President Trump’s rally Wednesday night targeted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and broke out into chants of “send her back.”
The chant erupted during the Greenville, N.C., rally after Trump made a series of remarks blasting Omar following days of attacks on her and other nonwhite progressive congresswomen, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.).
{mosads}All of the freshman lawmakers are U.S. citizens; Omar is the only one of the four born outside of the U.S., having arrived as a child refugee from her native Somalia.
Omar responded to the chant by sharing a quote from Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise.”
“You may shoot me with your words,/You may cut me with your eyes,/You may kill me with your hatefulness,/But still, like air, I’ll rise,” Omar tweeted Wednesday.
Social media users, including many U.S. and foreign politicians, used the hashtag #IStandWithIlhan as a message of solidarity following the chant.
More than 153,000 tweets had been sent with the phrase as of Thursday morning.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 presidential contender, said that he is proud of Omar’s work in Congress.
“Trump is stoking the most despicable and disturbing currents in our society,” Sanders wrote. “And that very hatred and racism fuels him. We must fight together to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of our country.”
Former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh (lll.) said that it saddened him to see the “standard-bearer” for his party embrace the chant.
“It’s so ugly. It’s so un-American. It just saddens me beyond belief,” Walsh wrote.
Guy Verhofstadt, a Belgian politician and member of the European Parliament, called the Trump rally chant “monstrous.”
Thousands of others offered their own messages of support for the freshman congresswoman.
While some spoke out against the Trump rally chant, supporters of the president also took to Twitter with a dueling hashtag of #IStandWithPresTrump.
With 49,000 tweets as of Thursday, some of his supporters stood by his decision to attack Omar.