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The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., wasn’t born here, but the Trump administration’s nascent attempt to strip her legal status is the best argument I can imagine for birthright citizenship.
Precisely because Omar is not a birthright citizen, her case shows us what a determined government can do when citizenship is contingent and contested. It can dig through your family history looking for a reason to declare that you were never really an American.
Birthright citizenship forecloses that kind of abuse. It offers a remarkably simple guarantee: You were born in the United States, so you are an American, and no one can take that away from you.
Omar came to the U.S. as a 12-year-old refugee from Somalia in 1995. She became a U.S. citizen at 17 in tandem with her father. And now, the Trump administration is looking to reverse all of that because Omar committed the crime of having bad takes — a charge that not a soul in the Trump administration could beat.
The case revolves around Omar’s birth year: An old Minnesota legislative biography listed her as born in 1981 rather than 1982, her official birth year. Her staff had the date corrected in 2019, saying it was an error, but Trump administration investigators are now examining whether Omar or her father intentionally lied about her age on immigration paperwork. If she was actually born in 1981, she would have been an adult when her father became a citizen in 2000, meaning she wouldn’t have automatically been granted citizenship alongside him.
None of this would be happening if Omar weren’t an outspoken progressive who has spent a decade as a vocal opponent of President Trump, launching inquiries into the administration’s controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minnesota and vowing to vote against giving a “single cent“ to ICE.
As the far right has become increasingly unhinged about Somali immigrants — Trump called them “garbage” four times in seven seconds at a Cabinet meeting last December — the administration has fixated on Omar’s citizenship: Trump has said we should “throw her the hell out of our country,“ and that she “could also go to jail.” Vice President JD Vance has said Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud“ and that he was working with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to figure out “remedies.”
Going after the citizenship status of your political opponents is, and I do not say this lightly, Nazi shit.