Chants of “deport” rang out Monday night as President Donald Trump criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, at a rally for Republican candidates in Youngstown, Ohio.
“I don’t know what they’re doing with it, but I can tell you this: She’s a disaster,” Trump said of Omar, whose home in Washington, D.C., was searched hours earlier by federal agents, two people familiar with the investigation told NBC News.
A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement that Homeland Security Investigations “executed a judicially authorized search warrant” as “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” The statement did not specify that the investigation was related to Omar, nor did it provide more information about the search.
“She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military, where all they do is shoot each other, and she comes into our country and she says, ‘I have a constitutional right,’” Trump said. “She’s telling us about the Constitution, and she comes from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet.”
Trump then spoke of Somali gang activity in Minnesota and what the FBI has described as a recently thwarted shooting at the state’s Mall of America, alleged to have been plotted by an American-born U.S. citizen of Somali descent, The Associated Press reported. That’s when the first wave of “deport” chants began.
Omar, who was born in the war-torn country of Somalia, immigrated to the U.S. as a child decades ago. El-Sayed was born in Michigan to Egyptian immigrants.
“For 10 years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns,” Omar wrote earlier Monday on X. “This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.”
Speaking to reporters Monday afternoon, Trump said he had “nothing to do” with the search of Omar’s home.
At the rally, he segued from his attack on Omar and people of Somali descent in Minnesota to an attack on El-Sayed.
“These people are crazy,” Trump said. “You look at the guy running in Michigan. He’s a jihadist.”
Trump went on to praise El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, before he again referred to El-Sayed as a “jihadist” and proclaimed that “Somalia bandits, Third World gangsters, jihadist sympathizers do not belong in Ohio.”
He added: “They don’t belong in America. Better get them the hell out of here.”
More chants of “deport” then erupted from the audience at Youngstown’s Covelli Centre.
A spokesperson for El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday night. Last week, after Trump referred to him on social media by his middle name, Mohamed, El-Sayed condemned it as a tactic meant to raise fears about his religion.
“They point to my name and they point to my faith, trying to distract us from the challenges that we have,” El-Sayed, who is Muslim, told supporters at an event Thursday in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “My name did not raise your gas prices. My faith is not the reason you can’t afford your groceries.”
Trump’s remarks Monday continued his leading role in ratcheting up rhetoric around Muslims and immigrants. Days after El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Trump warned that the U.S. could become a “jihadist-run country.” And Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., accused El-Sayed of sympathizing with Osama bin Laden as he was campaigning with Rogers last week in Michigan.
Trump was in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley — a once reliably Democratic region that has become increasingly Republican since his rise in politics — to campaign for Sen. Jon Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy, the state’s GOP nominee for governor.
It was his second visit to Ohio in less than 10 days. His last trip, to the Dayton area, included remarks about nearby Springfield. During a 2024 presidential debate, Trump repeated the unsubstantiated and racially charged claim that Haitian immigrants in the city were eating pets.
Trump mentioned Springfield again Monday in Youngstown, immediately after his attacks on Omar and El-Sayed.
“All of a sudden, they dropped 35,000 people in from Haiti, and it didn’t work out too well,” he said before he defiantly repeated his past falsehoods. “Remember during the debate I said some of the things they were doing? I was right.”