US President Donald Trump has redoubled his attack on four Democratic congresswomen, accusing them of “hating our country”.
“If you are not happy, if you are complaining all the time, you can leave,” he told a heated news conference outside the White House.
On Sunday Mr Trump called on the women, who are from ethnically diverse backgrounds, to “go back”.
He was widely accused of racism and xenophobia, which he denied.
Mr Trump first sparked a furore in a series of tweets on Sunday in which he said the women “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe”.
He did not explicitly name the women, but the context made a clear link.
The four – US-born Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar, who came to the US as a refugee aged 12 – all called the president racist and were backed by members of the Democratic Party.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx in New York, about 12 miles (19km) away from the Queens hospital where Mr Trump was born.