The establishment press and some Democrats are strangely mute over the president’s flagrant abuse of the legal system.
Donald Trump has long fantasized about deporting Representative Ilhan Omar. In 2019, Trump lashed out against Omar and her congressional colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—all left-wing Democrats and women of color and part of the “Squad.” Deploying a familiar xenophobic jibe, Trump taunted, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” For three of the Squad, Trump’s threat was vile but empty: Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Pressley were all born in the United States.
But for Omar, Trump’s words carried a direct intent of harm. Omar was born in Somalia, came to the United States at age 8 as a refugee, and was eventually granted citizenship at age 17 in 2000. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that in 2019, the same year Trump was telling Omar to “go back” to where she came from, his administration ordered immigration officials to comb through her personal records to find evidence of fraud that could lead to her removal from the US. This fishing expedition came up empty-handed.
Never one to be defeated by a mere lack of evidence, Trump has persisted in calling for Omar’s deportation ever since—calls that have ramped up over the last year. In January, he said Omar should be sent “back to Somalia,” a call he repeated the following month. In March, Vice President JD Vance joined in, bluntly declaring, without evidence, that Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud.”
There are ample reasons why Omar has been one of Trump’s favorite punching bags. As a leading leftist in Congress, she is a natural antagonist. But, more importantly, as a fearless Somali American woman, she excites all the passions of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny that animate Trump and his MAGA movement.
Given the long history of Trump’s vendetta against Omar, it was ultimately not surprising when the Department of Homeland Security raided her home this week in search of evidence of immigration fraud, a move that The Wall Street Journal reports is motivated by a goal of stripping her of her citizenship.
The campaign against Omar stinks to high heaven of partisanship and bigotry. It is also part of a larger pattern of Trump’s weaponization of law enforcement to punish perceived enemies. As The New Yorker documented recently, Trump’s persecutions have done immense harm to the Department of Justice:
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Numerous attorneys have been pushed out or fired after refusing to prosecute such Trump enemies as the former F.B.I. director James Comey and the New York attorney general Letitia James. When these vindictive prosecutions eventually fell under scrutiny in courtrooms, they didn’t fare well. It is extremely rare for grand juries to dismiss charges brought by federal prosecutors, but the case against James, who was accused of committing mortgage fraud, has been rejected twice. Indictments of James and Comey were initially secured by Lindsey Halligan, a lawyer and a former beauty-pageant contestant whom Trump had appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, even though she’d had no experience as a prosecutor. But a magistrate judge subsequently reprimanded her for a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps,” including repeatedly misstating the law to grand jurors. Another judge then dismissed both cases, ruling that Halligan had been appointed unlawfully.
But there’s a striking fact that sets the malicious prosecution apart: Unlike earlier victims of Trump’s lawless abuse of the justice system, Omar isn’t getting a full-throated defense from the political and media elite.
Omar does have people fighting on her side. As my Nation colleague John Nichols reports, she remains popular with her constituents in Minnesota, and the state’s Democratic Party has rallied to her side. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries decried Trump’s “vile personal attacks” and the fact that Trump’s “violent mass deportation machine has descended upon the home of a duly elected Member of Congress and her family.” Even former Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was critical of Trump. In a post on X.com, Greene asked how “pretending to get ready to deport Ilhan Omar is going to bring gas down under $2, make health insurance freaking affordable, make a family’s weekly grocery bill make sense, and stop sending our beloved military off to fight for another fucking foreign war???”
Greene’s pointed rebuke of Trump stands in sharp contrast to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who in the five days since the raid has yet to say one word in defense of Omar.
Schumer’s silence is hardly surprising. Because Omar has been outspoken in her criticism of Israel and the Israel lobby, establishment Democrats such as Schumer have often kept their distance from her.
Omar’s criticism of Israel and her larger anti-war stance are overwhelmingly popular with Democratic Party voters and have majority support with the general public. According to a recent poll by Project 270, 67 percent of the public want to end overseas war, and 51 percent believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza (as against 29 percent who deny that genocide has occurred). But these positions are less popular with the political and media elite.
Other victims of Trump’s wrath have been turned into media heroes. But Omar is being treated differently. Writing in The Intercept, Adam Johnson drew a pointed contrast between the Omar raid and the August 2025 raid on the home of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic.
The very day of the Bolton raid, we saw scathing editorials from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each of these newspapers also published separate pieces from their opinion staff opposing the raid, casting doubt on its legitimacy, and otherwise leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in Politico, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns.
The raid on Omar’s home has thus far received zero of the above media interventions. No editorials, no opinion columns in the Times, Post, or Journal; no preening in The New Yorker or Politico or Atlantic about the erosion of “rule of law.” The Atlantic did run an article on the Omar raid but it was equivocal and Both Sides in its tone…
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As Johnson notes, the reason for the difference in treatment is simply one of identity: Omar is a critic of the establishment, while Bolton is a fixture of the national security state.
On his Unpopular Front Substack, John Ganz also noted that the response to the Omar raid has been “muted” and “tepid.” He suspected the reason might be complacency, due to the “repeated failure of this regime to prosecute its enemies.” But Ganz rightly notes that the attack on Omar is one of the most disturbing events of Trump’s presidency, since it upturns the core principles of liberal democracy:
[T]he attack on citizenship itself is both the very essence of the Trump movement and its most dangerous feature. From birtherism to the stolen-election myth, Trumpism can be understood as the notion that some Americans are not really Americans, that their political rights are illegitimate, and that the nation must be purged of these interlopers.
Ganz is right to highlight the dangers of Trump’s actions. One could add that there is a dual threat: Trump’s subversion of liberal democracy is aided and abetted by an establishment that is so committed to fending off outsiders that it can’t be bothered to defend Ilhan Omar at this crucial moment.
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