In Congress and at Home, Omar Faces Trump’s Anti-Somali Attacks

When Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, became an American citizen in 2000, she viewed her U.S. passport with pride.

But ever since President Trump was first elected in 2016, she said, she has come to view it as a “document of safety.”

“I have carried my passport with me since he first became president,” Ms. Omar, a Somali-born refugee who emigrated to the United States when she was 12, said in an interview on Capitol Hill this week, where she reflected on the latest cycle of dehumanizing personal attacks on her by the president.

Mr. Trump had recently called her “garbage” at a cabinet meeting and said of Somalis, generally: “I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason.”

At a Dec. 9 rally in Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump mocked Ms. Omar’s hijab, which he called a “little turban,” and complained that she “does nothing but bitch.”

He added: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries?”

And back at home in Minnesota, the Trump administration surged Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to her community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region for the latest stage in its deportation efforts. Among those caught up in the enforcement push was Ms. Omar’s own son, an American citizen who is 20 and was stopped briefly on Dec. 13 by ICE agents.

“It is clear to me that this surge came in direct response to Trump’s racist comments about Somali people, and about me in particular,” Ms. Omar wrote on Dec. 12 to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary.

In Congress, she has long been a target of Republicans writ large. In 2023, House Republicans voted to remove Ms. Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee over past comments about Israel that were widely condemned as antisemitic.

Personal attacks on Ms. Omar, 43, have been an ugly staple of Mr. Trump’s speeches since she was first elected in 2018 and made history, alongside Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, as one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.

Now, as she attempts to help Somali refugees in her district weather Mr. Trump’s crackdown, she continues to absorb some of the president’s most vicious verbal attacks.

During his first term, Mr. Trump caused a stir when he said that the four young Democratic women of color in the House who became known as “the Squad” should “go back” to the countries where they came from.

Ms. Omar was the only one of the four who was not born in the United States.

If it all gets to her, Ms. Omar is careful not to let on.

“We feel bad, actually, for the president,” she said of herself and other members of the Somali-American community. “We also know we’re not garbage. We have not been broken by the life experiences that we’ve gone through. Words are not really that hurtful when you’ve survived war.”

Ms. Omar was 8 when her family fled Somalia because of its civil war. She lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years before immigrating to the United States.

“I remember him implementing the Muslim ban and my first thought was, ‘Where are my documents?’” she recalled of life during the first Trump administration. “I believe that was the thought for a lot of people, of immigrants, and even first generation: ‘Are we safe? Do we know where our documents are?’”

These days, it’s one of the first pieces of advice she gives to her own children and to her constituents, amid the stepped-up ICE operations.

The Department of Homeland Security has branded its efforts there “Operation Metro Surge,” and claims to have arrested more than 400 undocumented immigrants in Minnesota.

Ms. Omar, in response, has demanded answers from Ms. Noem, claiming that the effort has resulted in “blatant racial profiling, an egregious level of unnecessary force, and activity that appears designed for social media rather than befitting a law enforcement agency.”

After Ms. Omar announced that her son had been stopped by ICE, the department dismissed it as a made-up public relations stunt.

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“ICE has absolutely ZERO record of its officers or agents pulling over Congresswoman Omar’s son,” the agency wrote online.

In response, Ms. Omar said she was pleased to learn that D.H.S. kept such records, and that they should turn them over to Congress.

“If they are documenting the stops, maybe with video, we would love for them to share that information,” she said. “If their denial is based on documentation they have, why are they denying members of Congress that information?”

Ms. Omar said that her son’s interaction with ICE was “very brief, because he did have his passport.”

Sitting in her office, which is filled with Somali art and a large American flag, Ms. Omar speaks quietly and confidently. She views herself as a fighter. The door to her office is covered in colorful sticky notes from visitors thanking her for her “strength and courage,” and telling her to “keep your head up, they need help seeing your crown.”

She bristles at the suggestion that she is speaking out more now than she did during Mr. Trump’s first term, when she was brand-new to national politics.

“I believe I did a good job pushing back the first time,” she said. “I’ve never been one to back down to bullies.”

Ms. Omar has been a lightning rod of a lawmaker since she arrived on the national stage. In 2019, Ms. Omar drew criticism from Democrats and Republicans for posting online that certain pro-Israel groups were “all about the Benjamins, baby,” seeming to reference an antisemitic trope about Jews and money. She apologized for the comment.

In 2021, she appeared to equate terror attacks carried out by groups like Hamas with actions of the U.S. government when she wrote: “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.” She later said she had not meant to compare them.

Ms. Omar said the president was targeting her these days because attacking a woman of color is more comfortable for him than addressing the economic pain Americans are feeling from his policies.

“He’d rather have headlines that say the president attacks a sitting member of Congress,” she said. “Those are the kinds of headlines he’s comfortable with.”

Still, the impact can be harrowing.

During the 2020 election, when Mr. Trump would often disparage Ms. Omar at rallies and whip up the crowd to chant “send her back,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure she was provided with 24-hour security from the Capitol Police.

The death threats subsided under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., she said. But they have climbed back to 2020 levels.

“There is a clear correlation between Trump and the level of death threats,” she said. “There’s multiple people who are incarcerated, some waiting for sentencing, for threatening to kill me and my family.”

These days, like all rank-and-file lawmakers, she pays for security out of her own campaign funds.

“We have not been offered that from this speaker, and I’m not surprised,” she said of any protection from the Capitol Police.

Ms. Omar said she still feels called to serve, despite the threats, and believes that it is important for immigrants to see someone who looks like her in Congress. She said her office has become the first call that immigrants across Minnesota make when they need help — not just people who live in her district.

“They feel this is the office that’s going to take their call,” she said.

But she also conceded that her presence in Congress may be the very reason Mr. Trump is going out of his way to target Somalis.

“I do feel there is a great benefit in this moment that someone like me is visibly representing not just our state but the country,” she said. But later, she added: “I don’t think there is particular rhyme or reason who he picks to target. It could be because I’m a very visible member of Congress and I just happen to be Somali.”

Ms. Omar said she is generally an optimist, but conceded, “I think we cannot be optimistic about things getting better.”

If Democrats win control of the House or the Senate next year, “we have a chance to mitigate some of the pain and suffering,” she said, “but the damage that they’ve caused not just to people but to our institutions, to the rule of law, to our democracy — that is a generational fix.”

Still, she said she would be happy to sit down with the president and talk with him.

“I would invite the president to have Somali tea with us to see how non-garbage and amazing we are,” she said. She chuckled at the idea of possibly charming him, the way New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, appeared to do in the Oval Office. In a word, she said, such a meeting would be “epic.”

Steven Cheung, a White House spokesman, said a Trump-Omar tea summit was out of the question.

“Oldest trick in the book,” he said. “She should stop taking ideas from Wile E. Coyote.”

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