On the morning of October 12, federal agents raided a house in one of Washington DC’s northeast neighborhoods. They were collecting evidence. Was it the residence of any one of the politically powerful men mentioned in the Epstein files? To date, the only two arrests have been Jeffrey Epstein and his co-trafficker, Ghislaine Maxwell. Was it the home of Kristi Noem? In the last year, she spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on luxury jets—the jets, she says, would be used for deportations. Or, perhaps, it was where Pete Hegseth lived? The United Nations had recently accused the US military of committing war crimes in Iran, under Hegseth’s leadership.

No. These federal agents were with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). The home they were raiding belonged to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. HSI agents seized her phone, computer, and notebooks as part of an investigation into “immigration fraud,” predicated on claims around her marriage history and what age her father had said she was when applying for citizenship. 

Right-wing Retaliation

The timing, the context, and the goal are clear: This search warrant was executed weeks before the midterm elections, against a Muslim woman and Somali American serving a district at the center of Operation Metro Surge, ICE’s invasion of Minnesota last winter. It came just weeks after she introduced the Make ICE Pay Act, proposing a reallocation of ICE’s budget to the communities most impacted by their terror campaigns. The Trump regime’s clear intent is to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her, and they have launched a fishing expedition to find a pretext.

But this isn’t just an attack on Ilhan Omar—this is an attack against Muslim and Somali Americans, two of those communities that have been subjected to endless racist abuse from the Trump regime. Her being one of the original members of the “Squad” also played a part, and this is certainly tied to the wave of political repression directed at the broader left in the United States. This includes the Minnesota 15 and the Righteous 39 in the Twin Cities, as well as the Michigan 8, Spokane 3, and the Prairieland defendants—all activists that have done what hundreds of thousands have done in the past several years; they’ve spoken out and protested against ICE and the genocide in Gaza.

After the general strike in Minneapolis on January 23 and the historic actions in Minnesota’s streets over the winter, Trump is still licking his wounds and vindictive. This is just another stop on his campaign trail of vengeance. It’s a threat: No undocumented, asylum-seeking, or even naturalized American is safe if you speak out against our violent, racist, xenophobic, right-wing government. Currently, there are approximately 26 million naturalized citizens in the US. Trump has made it no secret that denaturalization is a weapon his administration will wield against anyone who commits any infraction or isn’t groveling at the feet of imperialism. 

Trump’s been vilifying Omar since she spoke out against the US-Israel war machine in 2019. Now, the Justice Department has broken “time-honored norms” by bringing forth an investigation of a sitting member of Congress within 60 days of an election. This is just one of a flurry of cases the DOJ has pushed in the last month that focus on outspoken critics of Trump.

While this timing is unheard of for the modern-day Department of Justice, there is a history of denaturalization and deportation as a means to repress left-wing activists and working-class struggle in the United States. During Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and a young J. Edgar Hoover stripped Lithuanian-born anarchist Emma Goldman of her citizenship and deported her to the Soviet Union. She was among hundreds of other foreign-born communists and anarchists who were detained and deported in what’s known as the Palmer Raids.

Drop The Investigation, Stop The Repression!

If only there was universal support for Ilhan Omar among House Democrats: 40 of her own Democratic colleagues did not sign the letter condemning the Trump administration’s raid and urging that the investigation be dropped. It’s unsurprising that a thoroughly corporate party would contain so many representatives who see this attack as too risky to comment on ahead of their elections. Some may even see this intimidation of a pesky left-leaning colleague as not such a bad thing.

We have serious political disagreements with Omar—her commitment to working within the Democratic Party being one of them—but that doesn’t change us seeing this for what it is: A racist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, right-wing attack and an attempt to fearmonger and repress immigrants and anyone who fights alongside them. We’ve seen this one before.

Socialist Alternative calls for dropping this investigation, and to drop the charges against all anti-ICE protesters and targets of political repression. As part of this fight, we call for building a mass workers’ party, one that would boldly push back against the Trump regime with methods of mass struggle—something the Democratic Party has no interest in doing because of the potential threat to their system. It’s clear that neither of the two capitalist parties have any way forward for immigrants, or for the working class as a whole. A genuine left alternative, made up of workers and young people, is what’s needed to dismantle everything Trump stands for.