The New York Times reports:

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. [Continue reading…]