The attempt to strip Omar of her citizenship is part of a much bigger push for the mass denaturalization of American immigrants.
Ilhan Omar speaks to MS Now about the raid on her home.
(MS Now)
Last week, Representative Ilhan Omar’s Washington, DC, home was raided by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Omar has not been indicted or criminally charged, but the Trump administration has now said that it was investigating whether Omar had acquired her US citizenship through fraudulent means after arriving in the country as a 12-year-old from Somalia.
There are multiple allegations the DHS appears to be pursuing, one claiming that Omar’s father lied on her immigration paperwork to say she was 17 instead of 18, thus allowing for her to acquire citizenship through her own father’s naturalization. Another allegation apparently being investigated is one that has regularly percolated through the conservative media sphere for years: that Ilhan Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, is in fact her brother, and that she fraudulently sought to extend her own citizenship to him through incestuous means. The government has apparently acquired her DNA to pursue this, reportedly by having taken discarded garbage from her home (though the government has denied the account of this specific method).
The Wall Street Journal reported after the raid that the Trump administration was pursuing something that had never been attempted before against a member of Congress: denaturalization and removal from the United States. Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called “border czar,” then confirmed to Fox News that such extreme measures were on the table.
Denaturalization is in vogue right now. Deportation, detainments, visa revocations, and entry bans have all been part of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crusade. But there are simply not enough -citizens present in the United States, whether documented or undocumented, to fulfill the national cleansing that the government appears to be openly salivating after.
On New Year’s Eve in 2025, the DHS posted a picture of a peaceful, unnaturally spotless beach and a perfect blue sky, with the caption: “America After 100 Million Deportations. The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.” There are estimated to be roughly 15 million undocumented migrants present in the United States, 13 million green-card holders, and 3 million documented noncitizens on temporary visas. In a perfect Republican world, one where every undocumented and documented noncitizen is deported, you still only get to 31 million, well below the magic number needed to supposedly ensure America’s prosperity. Thus, naturalized citizens—those who went through all of the legal hoops, learning American civics and all the little bits of this country’s history—have to be next on the chopping block. And as a high-profile political antagonist of President Trump, Omar is an inviting target. Back in May, when discussing Omar, Trump had mockingly imitated her saying, “The Constitution gives me certain rights,” before dismissing her as a “phony” and saying she should “get the hell out.”
While Omar is not the most leftist member of the Democratic Party (she is not a member of the DSA, for instance), she is something that is arguably just as bad in the Republican Party’s imagination: a Somali American, the first to be elected to Congress.
Current Issue
Trump has aimed his ire at many different ethnic groups over his two terms, but he has targeted the Somali community in an especially venomous way. Days before Omar’s house was raided, Trump posted that her home state of Minnesota, which has the nation’s largest Somali American community, was “being taken over by Somali Immigrants” and urged Minnesotans to “fight back,” adding that the “Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing.” In particular, Trump promised those fighting the alleged malign influence of the local Somali community that, if need be, “the Federal Government will come to your rescue.”
Omar, perhaps the most prominent Somali American in the country, has been the prime target within this larger communal attack for years. Since she first ran for Congress in 2018, Omar has been accused of antisemitism, being “Somalia-first,” supporting multiple terrorist groups, secret communism, financial and tax fraud, both polygamy and adultery, and being a foreign agent. While most of these allegations have come from Republicans, many Democrats have joined the pile-on, in particular to attack Omar’s criticism of Israel. (This lack of solidarity from some Democrats continues even now; Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has not commented on the raid despite its having happened over a week ago, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar only questioned the raid’s timing, while offering no support for Omar or larger criticism of the move.)
While the denaturalization of a serving member of Congress is unprecedented, past governments have tried to denaturalize elected officials, driven by the same anti-immigrant, partisan dynamics that are behind the anti-Omar campaign. Perhaps the most notable such target was Stanley Nowak, a Polish American union organizer who briefly served as a Democratic state senator in the Michigan legislature from 1939 to 1948. Nowak had worked in the past with communist publications and organizations in the 1920s, but never said that he himself was a member of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, in 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s government initiated proceedings to denaturalize him on the basis that he had concealed his connection to communist groups while applying for citizenship. As with Omar, the aim was to use charges of immigration fraud as a pretext to remove someone whose leftist politics the government deemed unacceptable.
The case only proceeded for a few months before FDR’s attorney general dropped the matter, but it was revived in 1952 during the Truman administration, dragging on until 1958 under the Eisenhower administration, with Nowak’s citizenship being revoked and then restored later by the Supreme Court. The ultimate failure to deport Nowak could be construed as a victory for the rule of law, but nativism and a hatred of those who criticized the United States were what governed his prosecution, and those sentiments have only built, grown, and spread to new hosts since then.
Even if all 26 million naturalized American citizens were to be deported en masse, the work of building the ideal fascist state would not be complete. After all, the Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to end birthright citizenship, thus making the millions of Americans born to immigrant parents vulnerable to removal. There are also those whose parents are American citizens but are of the same irksome race that noncitizens are, like Somalis or Haitians, or of enemy nationalities, like Palestinians and Iranians, who will almost undoubtedly come on the chopping block in the coming months and years. Then there are people who, though they may be white, Protestant, and otherwise spotless in their racial makeup, are deemed to have voided their right to Americanness by opposing the state of Israel—thus “becoming Palestinian,” as Trump once described Schumer. The idea of making someone born in the United States, to American parents, stateless is no vice to certain members of Congress, such as Randy Fine, who wrote a letter this year demanding the revocation of the passports and the barring of reentry to activists and journalists who attended the funeral of Ali Khamenei, accusing them of treason, a crime punishable by death in the United States.
The breadth of this crusade is one of the reasons it is ultimately useless to note the obvious shoddiness of the case against Omar. This is an administration that recognizes no limits and knows it is dealing in deceit, a massive, systemic fraud of its own. The point of this case is to be a stress test for wide-scale denaturalization in the remaining years of Trump’s second term. Even if the move against Omar fails, we cannot rely on one of the most right-wing Supreme Courts in American history to be so forgiving towards lesser-known individuals, not to mention that every time one of these cases makes its way through the courts, the Trump administration will take notes and fine-tune its approach. Through these proceedings, the government will be able to know better what matters it can simply ignore the decisions of courts on, and what angles the Democratic Party will simply ignore either out of lack of care or silent agreement. Omar may be the story now, but there are thousands more waiting to be written with bitter hands, out of sight.
More from The Nation
The president’s flailing midterms campaign underscores a truth we should be acknowledging more often: He kind of sucks at this.
Unlike other establishment figures, the former president isn’t scared to associate with the party’s left flank.
The world’s richest man—saying he’s “wised up” to the fiction of self-government—is leveraging his wealth to sway elections, threaten Congress, and alter the global balance of pow…
The progressive Senate candidate has won over students with his politics—and, in at least one case, his protein intake.
In this week’s Elie v. U.S, our justice correspondent challenges Democrats’ lack of a plan if Trump steals the midterms. Plus: the most racist, and honest, AI add ever.