The Real Stakes of the Ilhan Omar Case
All the way back in 2015, as Donald Trump was ascending onto the political stage, he proposed a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Islamophobia featured prominently in that first campaign for the Presidency. “If you have people coming out of mosques with hatred and death in their eyes and on their minds,” he said, on CBS News, “we’re going to have to do something.” A few months after pressing for the ban, Trump declared, simply, “I think Islam hates us.”
A complete prohibition on immigration by Muslims was blatantly unconstitutional, but that did not stop Trump, during his first week in office, from signing an executive order that banned travel from a list of Muslim-majority countries. After several legal challenges, Proclamation 9645, the third iteration of the policy, which the White House had expanded to include two non-Muslim countries—Venezuela and North Korea—was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts, in his 5–4 opinion, noted that the Court must consider not only the President’s contentious statements but also the executive’s “authority” on matters of immigration and national security.
Meanwhile, in a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the Court could not disregard the President’s racist intentions. “What began as a policy explicitly ‘calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ has since morphed into a ‘Proclamation’ putatively based on national-security concerns,” she wrote. “But this new window dressing cannot conceal an unassailable fact: the words of the President and his advisers create the strong perception that the Proclamation is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers.”
Questions of contamination and concealment appear newly relevant in light of a raid by more than a dozen federal agents on Representative Ilhan Omar’s home in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. It was six o’clock in the morning when Omar, who had just returned from a trip a few hours earlier, awoke to sounds of banging on her front and back doors. As Omar relayed in a recent interview with MS NOW, she was confused and disoriented: She and her husband were presented with a search warrant by officers with Homeland Security Investigations, an immigration-enforcement agency that typically pursues crimes such as drug or child trafficking. Over the next several hours, the agents scoured each room of Omar’s home, taking with them seventeen items, including her phones, a daughter’s old cellphone, and her husband’s camera, as well as a Somali-language phrase book.
The following day, anonymous government officials confirmed to reporters that the raid was part of an investigation into potential immigration fraud. The government was building a case to denaturalize and ultimately deport Omar, who was born in Somalia and arrived in the U.S. as a child refugee in 1995 with her family, and who obtained citizenship five years later. The Trump Administration insists that this is not a political move, but the timing of the raid—a few weeks before a heated midterm election—suggests otherwise. Trump claimed that the investigation was spearheaded by the Justice Department and had “nothing to do with me.”
This strains the imagination. For ten years, Trump and Omar, who were first elected to public office on the same night, have sparred with open disdain. Omar described her 2018 congressional victory, in Minnesota’s Fifth District, as “a rejection of Donald Trump’s way of thinking.” The following year, she began to call for his impeachment. Trump, for his part, has accused her of praising Al Qaeda; of launching “vicious antisemitic screeds”; of marrying her brother; of being an “America-hating socialist,” a “disgrace,” a “sick woman,” a jihadist, a piece of human “garbage.” She should be “sent back to Somalia,” he has said.
Perhaps these statements by the President of the United States are incidental to current efforts by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to tackle a possibly fraudulent immigration application from more than thirty years ago. Perhaps they are coincidences, as prosecutors build a legitimate case against a sitting congresswoman, who happens to be a Black, Muslim woman in a hijab. But it would not be the first time that Trump has issued a racist threat, and then used the levers of power to make it reality.
Trump began his first term with a clear intent to restrict immigration. It wasn’t difficult to discern his underlying motives. In a major immigration-policy speech ahead of the 2016 election, he promised to “get the right people” by calling for new screening tests—an “ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values.” He has pursued this mission with furious determination in his second term, too. The number of migrants crossing the southern border has plunged. One of the first executive orders that he signed in January of 2025 effectively ended the U.S. refugee resettlement program. (Later, the Administration made an exception for white South Africans.) Although Joe Biden repealed the Muslim ban when he was in office, Trump announced more expansive restrictions; a recent analysis by the Cato Institute found that visa grants to people from Muslim-majority countries have reached nearly zero.
With the major immigration pipelines blocked off, the Administration turned its attention inward. Somali Americans became a repeated target. They “contribute nothing,” Trump told reporters, this past December, during a Cabinet meeting. “I don’t want them in our country.” Two days later, D.H.S. launched Operation Metro Surge, an aggressive and violent incursion in Minnesota, where much of the Somali diaspora lives. The official rationale was to clamp down on unauthorized immigration and to combat fraud. Greg Bovino, the former U.S. Border Patrol commander who has reportedly described undocumented immigrants as “filth,” “trash,” and “scum,” oversaw the operation; recently, he appeared at an anti-Muslim protest in Michigan alongside the far-right activist Jake Lang, where demonstrators called for the deportation of the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (who was born in the United States).
The Trump Administration’s animus has not been limited to the Somali community. On the campaign trail, in 2024, then Senator J. D. Vance claimed that Haitian migrants in Ohio ate pets; this year, the Administration revoked Temporary Protected Status for about three hundred and fifty thousand Haitians. In September, D.H.S. posted (and then deleted) an A.I.-generated image of a “Transformers” character facing off against an Indian Sikh man, with the phrases “America for Americans” and “Self-deport or find out.” But many Indians, like many Somalis, are U.S. citizens, as the Administration discovered during its crackdown in Minnesota.
Even for an agency that has been accused by multiple federal judges of flagrantly violating the law, actually deporting American citizens isn’t so easy. But there is a way to do so: by revoking their citizenship.
This isn’t entirely fantastical. There is considerable precedent for such a policy. In the first half of the twentieth century, as citizenship became a defining feature of nation-states, the U.S. stripped nearly twenty-two thousand people of that privilege. According to the scholar Patrick Weil, this was the most of any democratic country in that era. Political dissent spurred these efforts, as in the case of the activist and anarchist Emma Goldman. So, too, did straightforward racism—a series of exclusionary immigration laws ushered in an official, nativist reading of citizenship. In 1923, several years after a ban on most Asian immigration, the Supreme Court ruled that an Indian man seeking citizenship was racially ineligible for naturalization, in part because of the ban: how could Indians be American citizens if they weren’t even allowed to enter the country anymore? The government went on to denaturalize dozens of Indians living in the U.S.
The Civil Rights era led to the abolition of nationality-based immigration quotas. In 1967, the Court ruled that the Constitution protects “every citizen of this Nation against a congressional forcible destruction of his citizenship, whatever his creed, color, or race.” When denaturalizations did occur, they often involved egregious offenses, such as Nazism, war crimes, or espionage. Denaturalization was a dramatic punishment, and the legal and political consensus was that it must be predicated on a dramatic crime.
The War on Terror moved away from that precedent. In 2010, the government launched a program to find people who may have misrepresented their identities to obtain permanent residency or citizenship. The program, named Operation Janus, initially uncovered three hundred and fifteen thousand instances of missing fingerprint data in immigration files, which were flagged for further investigation. Among those, only a quarter of one per cent revealed potential fraud: people who had been ordered deported and seemed to have used different identities to gain U.S. citizenship.
It was hardly a widespread problem—but it provided an opening for Trump. In 2018, his Administration expanded these efforts, announcing a task force to actively search for people who may have lied on citizenship applications; the following year, he launched his own program, calling it Operation Second Look. The move was relatively quiet, but critics voiced concerns that the effort seemed less like an attempt to protect national security than an attack on naturalization itself. A former D.O.J. attorney warned, in the Times, that “if we’re going after people who did nothing of note, or whose wrong caused no harm, it means they’re going after citizenship.” Fear pervaded immigrant communities, where naturalization was believed to offer irrevocable protection. As reported in The Nation, many immigrants reconsidered getting naturalized at all, afraid of “being targeted or tripped in a lie.” By the end of Trump’s first term, the Justice Department had filed an average of twenty-five denaturalization cases a year.
In the summer of 2025, soon after Trump settled back into Washington, senior officials at the D.O.J. directed their attorneys to make denaturalization a priority. The White House outlined target goals: no fewer than a hundred new cases per month. After a slow start, efforts are ramping up. This past May, there were fifteen cases filed. In early October, the D.O.J. announced that it was moving to strip forty people of citizenship, what it boasted was the “largest denaturalization effort in modern history.” The Attorney General, Todd Blanche, claimed that the objective was to “maintain our national security and protect the American people.”
Trump is not the first President in recent decades to have enacted discriminatory national-security policies. In the aftermath of September 11th, the Bush Administration implemented a national registry that required immigrant boys and men from twenty-four Muslim-majority countries to register with the government. The aim was to search for ties to terrorism; the government ended up funnelling thousands of Muslims into deportation proceedings on mostly minor visa infractions. Later, the Obama Administration excluded dual nationals of four Muslim-majority countries from a visa waiver program, restricting their entry to the U.S.
Cassandra Burke Robertson, a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University who studies citizenship, told me that recent denaturalization efforts are nevertheless a departure from modern Presidencies, even from the veneer of Trump’s attempt, in his first term, to ban Muslim immigrants for the ostensible reason of keeping the nation safe. There is no window dressing this time. “The Trump Administration is the first that we’ve seen using denaturalization as an end goal in and of itself, not as a means of something else,” Robertson said.
In December, 1991, Parvez Manzoor Khan, a man in his thirties who hardly spoke English, journeyed from Pakistan to the United States to visit his brother. He presented a doctored passport at the border, which he acknowledged bore a name that was not his. He was briefly detained, then released on bond. He later found work as a truck driver, in Florida; married a U.S. citizen; and became a citizen himself, in 2006. When Operation Janus revealed a discrepancy between the fingerprints in his immigration files, authorities questioned Khan, and he again admitted that he had entered through fraudulent means. In 2017, the Trump Administration brought a denaturalization suit against Khan, who by then had been living in the U.S. for nearly three decades, and had become a grandfather.
A federal court eventually sided with the government, allowing it to strip Khan of his citizenship. James LaVigne, an immigration lawyer who defended Khan in court, told me that the government was successful in part because it had such strong evidence of misconduct, including a copy of the doctored passport, which Khan confessed to using, and the fingerprint discrepancy. Khan also had been ordered deported not long after he arrived, for missing an asylum hearing. (He never got the notice to appear for it, nor was he made aware of a deportation order.)
The case of Ilhan Omar is far less clear. No evidence has yet been presented to the public that she used a false identity to enter the United States, or that she has ever been ordered deported. According to initial reports, the case hinges on the possibility that, when Omar received U.S. citizenship through her father, she was not seventeen years old, as she claimed, but eighteen, which would’ve meant that she needed to pursue a citizenship application on her own. Trump allies have dredged up another allegation, too, long peddled by the MAGA crowd: that she may have later married her brother to help him secure permanent residency. A recent Times story quotes several anonymous former and current government officials who attribute some credibility to this claim, though they did not offer any specific evidence, and Omar has denied the allegation. (How this relates to her own citizenship status, if it does at all, remains hazy.) Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin intimated, in an interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” that the government could bring racketeering charges against Omar and anyone who abetted her if it is found that she procured citizenship through fraud. Increasingly, the Administration appears to be hunting for a crime to punish.
Even in cases where fraud is clear, denaturalization does not automatically result in deportation. LaVigne, for example, was able to fight for Khan to retain his permanent residency and remain in the U.S. after his citizenship was stripped, in part because the government chose not to pursue deportation. As for Omar, the President and his circle have openly called for expelling her from the country. Recently, Trump suggested that she could even go to prison. “I have some serious issues with the constitutionality of what is going on,” LaVigne told me. “I say that as a registered Republican. I don’t like what I see. It’s supposed to be a nation of law, not of men.”
The government continues to expend financial resources and manpower on the case. As the writer M. Gessen noted, in The New Yorker, in 2018, “just about every naturalized citizen might look like an outlaw, or a liar,” if inspected closely enough. Still, few legal experts believe that the Administration will succeed in unearthing definitive evidence against Omar. Her father is dead. And establishing that Omar or her family deliberately lied about her age would be complicated, because birth records are practically nonexistent in Somalia.
Even if the investigation fails to result in Omar’s denaturalization, it may provide Trump a victory of a different kind. Among the President’s many allegations against Omar—that she is a jihadist, or married to her brother, or guilty of fraud—is one underlying theme: that she is not really an American. According to Trump, Omar’s disgust with him, and with Republican policies, suggests that she “hates our country.” In this view, the parameters for citizenship are not national security or public safety but loyalty.
No wonder, then, that at a recent rally in Michigan to campaign for Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for Senate, Trump stood alongside David Beamer, whose son died on one of the hijacked planes on September 11th, as he excoriated Rogers’s opponent, Abdul El-Sayed. “The enemy is right here among us—local terrorists, local citizens that want to demolish our country,” Beamer said. “Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. You know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American.” ♦