Two California Republican congressmen won support for Texas Republican candidate Sery Kim after she said this week that she did not want Chinese immigrants to come to the United States and blamed them for the spread of the coronavirus.
The duo, Reps. Young Kim and Michelle Steel said in a joint statement on Friday: “We cannot, in good conscience, continue to support your candidacy”.
“As the first Korean-American Republican women to serve in Congress, we want to empower and elevate fellow members of the AAPI community who wish to serve their communities,” they said.
Sery Kim’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The candidate, who is also Korean-American, made false and anti-Chinese statements earlier this week during a candidate forum in the suburb of Fort Worth.
“I don’t want them here at all,” she said on Wednesday. “They steal our intellectual property, give us the coronavirus, are not responsible”.
“I can say that because I am Korean,” she argued.
The first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the country was a 35-year-old man from Snohomish County, Washington, who visited Wuhan, China, and probably other infections resulted from it.
Several of the initial coronavirus outbreaks in California and the East Coast were linked to people who had just arrived from Europe, where they were probably infected, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered.
Sery Kim, who worked in the Small Business Administration during the Trump administration, is running in a May 1 special election to fill the 6th Congressional District seat that was vacant when Ron Wright died earlier this year from complications from Covid- 19.
Young Kim and Steel said they tried to get Sery Kim to apologize without success.
“We spoke to Sery Kim yesterday about his offensive and false comments about Chinese immigrants, and made it clear that his comments were unacceptable,” said the duo.
