Kimberley Richards at HuffPost:

Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Ill.) is facing aggressive attacks from her Republican colleagues and other right-wingers over recent comments she made about her Guatemalan heritage. Last week, Ramirez had traveled to Mexico City, along with other members of congress, to attend an event at the second annual Panamerican Congress held in the Mexican capital. Speaking from a podium during her visit, a video clip shows the Illinois Democrat at one point expressing pride in her Guatemalan ancestry, saying the following in Spanish, which essentially translates to English as: “Let me ‘finish by saying a few words in Spanish’ because I’m a ‘proud Guatemalan before I am an American.’”

Republicans have expressed outrage over Ramirez’s comments after a seven-second clip of her remarks from the event made rounds on social media. On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security shared the short clip of Ramirez speaking to its official account on X, formerly Twitter, with a quote attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt that read, in part: “We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.”

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) misrepresented Ramirez’s remarks in a post on X, by accusing the Illinois representative of saying in the clip that she “puts Guatemala before the U.S.” “She’s currently the congresswoman for 720K+ Americans & is supposed to represent their interests on Capitol Hill,” he wrote. “Don’t run for Congress if you’re going to put another country first. This is common sense.” Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s border czar, told reporters, per C-Span, on Wednesday that he thought Ramirez’s comments were “disgusting.” And earlier this week, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) called for Ramirez to be deported. “Denaturalize, deport, and kick her off Homeland Committee. We know where her allegiances lie,” he wrote on X. Ogles’ post garnered nearly 30,000 “Likes” on X, with social media users — including MAGA social media influencer who goes by the name of Gunther Eagleman — joining him in calling for her to be deported.

Ramirez, however, was born in Chicago to Guatemalan immigrants. And as Paul A. Gowder, professor of law at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, previously emphasized to HuffPost, “Birthright citizenship is defined in the Constitution.” Ramirez, who became the first Latina to represent the Midwest in Congress when she was elected in 2022, has responded to the attacks. She released a statement on Monday saying: “Let’s call it what it is: today’s attacks are a weak attempt to silence my dissent and invalidate my patriotic criticism of the nativist, white supremacist, authoritarians in government.”

[“The family therapist David Freeman once concluded a public lecture on intimacy and relationships by saying that if there was any one thing he hoped his audience would remember from his talk, it was the awareness that one does not know his or her spouse, his or her children. We may believe we have a perfect idea of why they act as they do, when in reality our beliefs reflect no more than our own anxieties. Whenever we ascribe a motive to the other person, as in “you are doing this because...,” we discard curiosity and immobilize compassion. The person who knows has nothing to learn, has given up on learning.”]

Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder