The raid on Ilhan Omar’s house is dangerous political theater | Moira Donegan

On Monday, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the Washington DC area home of Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota congresswoman and a progressive Democrat, in the latest instance of Donald Trump’s effort to weaponize the national security state to harass, punish and embarrass his political opponents.

The raid, which was approved by a judge after a reportedly extensive back and forth with federal security officials, was nominally carried out in connection with a spurious criminal investigation into Omar’s childhood immigration to the US.

In reality, the episode is best understood as a bit of political theater. It was meant to embarrass Omar, a Black, immigrant Muslim woman in Congress whose ascent to national political prominence has become a symbol to the Maga right of the resentments and threats posed by pluralism.

It was meant to cast an air of suspicion and criminality over the Democratic candidates who, like Omar, are facing the voters in a matter of weeks.

It was meant to make the president seem strong and appease the racist impulses of his base as his party faces down what is expected to be a trouncing in November’s midterm elections.

And it was meant to convey, both to this wavering base and to the nation at large, the Maga movement’s vision of law and citizenship, which the president views not as guarantors of dignity in a liberal democracy, but as tools to enforce racial hierarchy within a much narrower and more punitive white nationalist project.

Let’s be clear: there is no evidence to support the allegation, which the raid on Monday was nominally meant to investigate, that Omar or her family committed immigration fraud when they came to the US as refugees in the late 1980s, when Omar was a child.

But just because something isn’t true has never stopped the Maga movement from repeating it. Both the conspiracist cesspool of the far-right internet and its denizens who now have places of prominence in the Republican party have repeatedly and falsely claimed that Omar is not a legitimate citizen.

“We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud,” said JD Vance, the vice-president – who once claimed, falsely, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating neighbors’ pets, and then defended his tendency to “create stories” about immigrants – on a podcast.

For his part, Trump seems to be particularly repulsed by Omar, the first Somali-American in Congress, and has been smearing, attacking and threatening her for the better part of a decade.

He has lately expanded his hate to all of Omar’s fellow Somali immigrants, complaining just days before the raid on Omar’s home that “the once great state of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali immigrants” and calling on non-Somali Minnesotans to “fight back”. Omar has previously faced threats and attacks in the wake of Trump’s comments about her.

The raid is likely intended to make the Trump administration seem fearsome and all-powerful, prompting acquiescence from institutions and frenzied satisfaction from his base in the style that was seen in the first months of 2025, immediately following Trump’s return to power.

This, at least, seems to be the idea behind Trump’s repeated attacks on Omar at campaign rallies this week; at one, the crowd responded to the president’s jeers about Omar by chanting “Deport! Deport! Deport!”

The scene evoked the signs at the 2024 Republican national convention, where Trump’s party rallied delegates with promises of mass ethnic cleansing and members of the crowd held signs aloft reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW.”

But it’s unclear whether this promise of racist libidinal gratification will be enough to motivate Trump’s 2024 supporters to get out to the polls in November – especially since many of them will have to pay upwards of $5 a gallon for the gas they need to get there.

But if we can interpret the Trump administration’s decision to raid Omar’s home as a cynical campaign tactic, the evident weakness of the ploy should not confuse us to the seriousness and degradation of Trump’s moral project.

Omar, after all, is not just a congresswoman: to the Trump world, she is a symbol. Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1982, Omar was barely out of infancy when her family fled the Somali civil war for a Kenyan refugee camp, and was still small when they settled in Minneapolis, the city that Omar now represents in Congress.

One would be hard pressed to find a more aggressively wholesome and picturesque story of the promise of American equality: that a child from a faraway country can come here and become a full and valued member of her community, can in fact come to represent her city in Congress on an equal footing as those who were born here – that their citizenship has no caveats or conditions on account of their race or origin – is both America’s greatest achievement and also the reality that the Trump movement emerged to eradicate.

If there’s a “fraud” that Trump and his cronies see in Omar, it might not be a literal immigration violation, as they claim, but something more abstract and spiritual. The “fraud” to them, is in Omar’s claim to the dignity of equal citizenship; in the idea that a woman, born in Somalia, might be as equally and powerfully American as they are.