Donald Trump is a man of loyalties and, above all, grudges. If there is one community for which the U.S. president has repeatedly shown contempt, it is the Somali community. And if there is one political rival who has borne the brunt of his hostility, it is Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia 44 years ago.
To be sure, she is not alone, as Trump has been particularly vicious in his attacks on women who dare to challenge him, including fellow congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and New York Attorney General Letitia James. But his remarks about Omar have been especially relentless over the years: he has called her “garbage,” encouraged rally crowds to chant for her deportation, and even targeted her family by repeatedly reviving the false claim that she married her own brother.
Now the Republican administration appears to be going a step further. The Justice Department, headed by Todd Blanche, whose résumé is defined above all by his unwavering loyalty to Trump, ordered a search of the congresswoman’s Washington home on Monday. Several media outlets now report that the ultimate goal is to strip Omar of her U.S. citizenship and deport her to Somalia, the country she left as a child. Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, brought her to the United States from a refugee camp in Kenya in 1995. The investigation centers on allegations that she lied about her age when she obtained U.S. citizenship in 2000.
The allegations are not new, but they have taken on greater significance in light of the Justice Department’s recent actions. All of this is unfolding just weeks before the midterm elections, in which Omar is seeking another term representing a Minnesota district, eight years after she and other progressive lawmakers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — members of the group that became known as the Squad — arrived in the House of Representatives.
‘Outrageous abuse of power’
The search of her home last Monday, carried out on orders from the Department of Homeland Security, ended with agents seizing her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and passport. That same day, her office denounced what it described as “an outrageous abuse of power” and an “unprecedented escalation” in the use of law enforcement agencies to target political opponents.
“For a decade, Donald Trump has relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with inflammatory rhetoric, repeatedly putting a target on her back. Now, those attacks have escalated to a pointless federal raid. The Congresswoman has done nothing wrong. No president should be able to use the power of the federal government to intimidate his political enemies,” her team said in a statement.
According to The Wall Street Journal, investigators are seeking to determine whether Omar or her late father altered the future congresswoman’s age on her citizenship application, listing her as 17 rather than 18, which would have entitled her to automatic citizenship. Omar denies any wrongdoing.
During Democrat Joe Biden’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security reportedly examined a similar allegation but decided not to pursue the matter because officials found no evidence of fraud, according to sources familiar with the case cited by the newspaper.
To substantiate the allegations, authorities have issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to several of Omar’s relatives, in an effort to secure testimony before a Minnesota grand jury.
Omar is already well accustomed to harassment from Trump-aligned groups and supporters. In January, during an operation in Minneapolis carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which ended with the deaths of two U.S. citizens, a white man approached the podium where she was speaking and sprayed her with a liquid. Authorities later charged the assailant with assault.
Following Monday’s search, Trump turned his fire on Omar during a late-day event in Ohio. Members of the crowd responded by chanting “Deport her.” The president’s remarks were not confined to his political rival; he broadened his attack to Somalis in general. “They cheat on everything,” he said.
The Trump administration has seized virtually every opportunity to target Minnesota’s Somali community, which numbers around 80,000 people, most of them legal residents or U.S. citizens. Last winter, it justified an ICE operation in Minneapolis by pointing to alleged fraud involving pandemic relief funds, a matter that had already been investigated. Speaking about Somali immigrants in December, Trump declared: “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country.” He also described Somalia as a country that “stinks.”
The Trump administration has embarked on an unprecedented effort to strip citizenship from individuals it considers undeserving of it, whether because they committed crimes or allegedly lied during the naturalization process. Authorities have filed roughly 200 denaturalization cases, a step that was rarely taken before Trump returned to the White House.
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