Illinois representatives on Monday denounced President Donald Trump's tweet on Rep. Ilhan Omar, calling it "dangerous" and "disturbing."
"To do a tweet as the president did, critical of a member of Congress who is Muslim, and to include pictures of 9/11 and references to it is playing with fire," Sen. Dick Durbin said.
Rep. Lauren Underwood said the tweet was "irresponsible" and could incite violence.
"I think it's disturbing that the president would take to Twitter to demean a colleague, a fellow public servant in Congress," she said.
Rep. Ilhan Omar says she's faced increased death threats since Trump spread around a video that purports to show her being dismissive of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
"This is endangering lives," she said, accusing Trump of fomenting right-wing extremism. "It has to stop."
Her statement late Sunday followed an announcement by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that she has taken steps to ensure the safety of the Minnesota Democrat and the speaker's call for Trump to take down the video.
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Soon after Pelosi's statement, the video disappeared as a pinned tweet at the top of Trump's Twitter feed, but it was not deleted.
And Trump further escalated the standoff Monday morning, tweeting that, "Before Nancy, who has lost all control of Congress and is getting nothing done, decides to defend her leader, Rep. Omar, she should look at the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and ungrateful U.S. HATE statements Omar has made"
"She is out of control, except for her control of Nancy!" Trump added.
Pelosi was among Democrats who had criticized Trump over the tweet, with some accusing him of trying to incite violence against the Muslim lawmaker. An upstate New York man recently was charged with making death threats against her.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders defended Trump earlier Sunday, saying the president has a duty to highlight Omar's history of making comments that others deem anti-Semitic or otherwise offensive and that he wished no "ill will" upon the first-term lawmaker.
The video in Trump's tweet included a snippet from a recent speech Omar gave to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in which she described the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center as "some people did something," along with news footage of the hijacked airplanes hitting the Twin Towers. Trump captioned his tweet with: "WE WILL NEVER FORGET!"
Critics accuse Omar of being flippant in describing the perpetrators of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. She later sought to defend herself by tweeting a quote from President George W. Bush, in which the Republican president referred to the attackers as "people" just days after 9/11.
Neither Trump's tweet nor the video included Omar's full quote or the context of her comments, which were about Muslims feeling that their civil liberties had eroded after the attacks. The tweet was posted atop Trump's Twitter feed for much of Sunday, with more than 9 million views. It remained lower in the feed after Pelosi requested that the video be pulled.
