For the Millionth Time, Rep. Ilhan Omar Has to Call Out the Trump Admin’s Racist Garbage

Since Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was elected to Congress in 2018, it seems like half her time has been spent calling out, pushing back on, and shutting down racist Republicans who consistently attack her for being an immigrant and a Muslim woman. On Sunday (and for about the millionth time this year alone), Omar was forced to go on the defensive again as the Trump administration’s rhetoric about Somali immigrants in the U.S. grows nastier, more xenophobic, and, as Omar herself said, more Nazi-like.

“These are Americans that he is calling garbage, and we feel like there is an unhealthy obsession that he has on the Somali community, and an unhealthy and creepy obsession that he has with me,” Omar told Margaret Brennan on CBS News’ Face the Nation. “We are also taxpayers in Minnesota…we’re also, as Minnesotans, as taxpayers, really upset and angry about the fraud that has occurred.”

Racist attacks against the Somali community have been ramping up in recent weeks, ever since MAGA became rabidly obsessed with a bunch of fraud cases in Minnesota that date back years. Dozens of individuals—including some Somali Americans—have been convicted in a series of schemes where various organizations requested reimbursements from the state government for handing out meals, medical care, and other services. One of the organizations, Feeding Our Future, allegedly submitted fake documents during covid, convincing officials that they had delivered food to thousands of kids. The founder of that group, who is Somali American, was convicted in March.

But the bigotry reached new lows last week, after the New York Times published a lengthy investigation on the scandals on November 29, reporting that federal prosecutors say “more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating.” The Trump admin quickly seized the opportunity to further vilify every Somali who has ever set foot in the U.S.

On December 1, the White House published a press release attacking Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and grossly claiming that “refugees from Somalia” were taking over the state. The press release also claimed that the money stolen had been funneled to al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida-connected terrorist organization based in Somalia. Then, on December 2, Trump went off about Somalis during a deranged rant at a cabinet meeting. “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” he said. (JD Vance was also reportedly pounding the table with his fists. So obnoxious.) “We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump continued. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”

Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar called President Trump’s comments about Somali Americans “disgusting” and says he has an “unhealthy obsession” with her and the Somali community. She tells @margbrennan this level of dehumanizing her community can lead to dangerous actions by those who… pic.twitter.com/cedTPU3P34

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 7, 2025

“His obsession with me is creepy,” Omar wrote on Twitter on Tuesday in response. “I hope he gets the help he desperately needs.” Trump doubled (tripled? quadrupled?) down on Wednesday, telling White House reporters: “Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country.”

The same day, the Treasury Department announced it was launching an investigation into the baseless terrorism claims, and Republicans on the House Oversight committee said they were launching an investigation into Governor Walz.

During her Sunday interview, Omar said she’s “pretty confident” those claims are false, and that if not, then that would be a “failure of the FBI.” She added that, of course, if U.S. tax dollars are being fraudulently sent to sponsor terrorism, then “we want those people prosecuted, and we want to make sure that that doesn’t ever happen again.”

About 84,000 people of Somali descent live in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which is about one-third of all Somalis in the U.S. Ninety-five percent of Somalis in Minnesota are U.S. citizens. Yet the Department of Homeland Security recently launched Operation Metro Surge—another one of its immigration crackdowns on Democrat-led cities—in Minneapolis, in which several ICE agents have been spotted lurking in areas heavily populated by Somalis. Amid fear of being detained, some Somali Americans have said they now carry their U.S. passports everywhere. 

In the same interview, Omar also had to address Stephen Miller’s latest racist claims. “When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany,” she said, when Brennan asked her about the White House Deputy Chief of Staff’s Thanksgiving Day tweets. 

Speaking about how two National Guard members were shot in Washington, D.C. by an Afghan national in late November, Miller tweeted a warning of the “great lie of mass migration.” “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies.” He added, “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” On Sunday, he felt it necessary to echo that sentiment, against Somalis specifically. “The entire Somali refugee program is predicated on a lie,” he wrote on Twitter. “Destroying your own country does not give you the right to become a citizen in ours.” 

In an essay published in the NYT, Omar attributed the president’s increased cruelty to an attempt to disguise his shortcomings. “The president knows he is failing,” she wrote on Thursday. “And so he is reverting to what he knows best: trying to divert attention by stoking bigotry.”

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