The Trump administration has sent its immigration police after the best-known Somali in the United States, and what it wants from Rep. Ilhan Omar is her citizenship. The raid on her home is aimed at every Somali family in Minnesota and at the movement that drove Operation Metro Surge out of the Twin Cities last winter. It comes from a government that lost that fight in the streets.
Agents of Homeland Security Investigations, the detective branch of ICE, searched Omar’s Washington-area home before dawn on Oct. 12 and carried out boxes. The raid came 22 days before the Nov. 3 elections, with Omar on the ballot and early voting already open in Minnesota. The Justice Department said only that a judge had signed the warrant as part of “an ongoing federal investigation.” According to The New York Times, the warrant lists false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, plus a conspiracy charge. The paperwork is what her late father filed when the family came to the United States as refugees. Omar was 12 when they arrived in 1995 and 17 when she became a citizen in 2000.
What they want is her citizenship
No charge against Omar has been announced. The accusations behind the raid are the same smears the right has pushed for a decade. No agency has ever produced evidence for any of them, and earlier federal inquiries closed without charges. Whatever the warrant claims about paperwork from the 1990s, the deadline for prosecuting it ran out years ago. Trump’s border chief, Tom Homan, admitted as much late last year, when he said the time limits had blocked earlier attempts to go after her.
Taking citizenship away in a civil case has no time limit. The Justice Department made such cases a priority in June 2025. If a judge strips Omar’s citizenship, deportation can follow. Administration officials have said this out loud. Vice President JD Vance said in March that the question was “how do you go after her.” In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested the investigation could end in deportation.
The federal government has run this play before. It spent two decades trying to deport Harry Bridges, the Australian-born leader of the West Coast longshore workers, whose union could stop cargo moving through every port from San Diego to Seattle. When the Supreme Court threw out his criminal conviction in 1953 because the time limit had expired, prosecutors filed a civil suit to take his citizenship. They lost that one in 1955. Going after Bridges meant going after the union that could shut the waterfront, and the longshore workers never let the government separate him from them. That same year the government deported Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born Black communist organizer, for what she wrote and said.
A whole community on probation
The target is bigger than one congresswoman. Minnesota has the largest Somali community in the United States. Most of its members are citizens, many of them born here. Deportation can’t reach citizens. Stripping citizenship can reach those who were naturalized, as Omar was. But the message is for everyone. If the government can take citizenship from the best-known Somali in the country, every Somali family in Minnesota is being told it could be next.
In December 2025, Trump called Somalis “garbage.” In January the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, and on Aug. 14 a federal judge let the termination go through, stripping protection from about 1,100 people. On Oct. 8, Trump posted that Minnesota “is being taken over by Somali Immigrants” and told his followers, “Fight back Minnesota, fight back!” At a Tennessee rally on Oct. 10 he said Somalia has nothing but “crime and squalor,” then added, “let’s see what happens.” Two days later the agents were at Omar’s door.
Racism is the oldest tool for splitting workers who would otherwise stand together. Trump’s Oct. 8 post was addressed to other Minnesotans, telling them to “fight back” against their Somali neighbors. The administration used a Twin Cities fraud case the same way in late 2025, as the excuse for sending Metro Surge into the cities. A community branded as criminal can be raided, watched and stripped of protection while its neighbors are told it had it coming. That plan failed last winter. Somali families, other immigrant communities, union members, students and neighbors who had never been to a protest stood together against ICE, and the surge could not pull them apart. The raid on Omar is the same plan tried again: cut the Somali community out of that movement and make it a target on its own.
A political police force
Her real offense is opposition. She condemned Metro Surge while it was killing people in her district, and she made sure Somali residents knew their rights if immigration agents stopped them. Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas called that helping an “invasion” and demanded her deportation. Rep. Randy Fine of Florida called her a “Muslim terrorist” for speaking out on Gaza and said she should not be a citizen. Whether she opposes ICE in Minneapolis or the genocide in Gaza that the United States arms and pays for, the answer is the same: take away her citizenship. In 2025 the administration jailed Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, students who spoke up for Palestine, and used their immigration status to try to deport them. The message to every naturalized worker who speaks up is that citizenship is on probation.
HSI has been building to this. On Aug. 6, a police officer in Richfield, Minnesota, found a woman watching Omar’s town hall from a Ford Explorer with plates registered to another vehicle. She said she was event security, then admitted she was an undercover HSI agent.
On June 16, HSI’s top official in Minnesota, Michael McCarthy, stood beside the federal prosecutor for Minnesota to announce conspiracy charges against 15 anti-ICE activists over their resistance to Metro Surge. Defense attorney Bruce Nestor described the defendants as “union members, workers, neighbors.” The prosecutor could not name a single agent injured by the conspiracy he alleged. In Texas, 15 Prairieland defendants were sentenced to more than 556 years combined, most of them for being present at a protest outside an ICE jail. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who was not at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of political pamphlets at his jailed wife’s request.
Surveillance of an elected official, conspiracy cases against the people who watched ICE, and now a search of a member of Congress in the middle of her reelection campaign: this is a political police force.
The courts are part of it. A federal judge signed the Omar warrant after more than a week of back-and-forth with prosecutors. Courts can also rule against the government, as they did for Bridges, but those rulings came after two decades in which the longshore workers refused to give him up. No court ruling takes the place of that kind of fight.
The investigations started before Trump came back. In June 2024, under Biden, federal prosecutors in Washington and the Justice Department’s public integrity unit opened an inquiry into Omar’s finances, campaign spending and contacts with a foreign citizen. It stalled for lack of evidence. Her immigration history has been picked over since she first ran for the Minnesota Legislature in 2016. The investigators, the prosecutors and the files stay in place when the White House changes hands. Trump inherited them and escalated, pointing them at Omar’s citizenship and sending armed agents to her home.
The government that lost in the streets
The administration is doing this from weakness. Operation Metro Surge flooded the Twin Cities with federal agents. Neighbors met it with rapid-response networks and ICE watch patrols, organizing their own defense without waiting for any government to protect them. On Jan. 7 an ICE agent killed Renee Good, and the confrontation sharpened. On Jan. 23 the people of Minnesota struck. The Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, with more than 80,000 members, backed the action, and so did the Minnesota Nurses Association. More than 700 businesses shut their doors. Every union grocery co-op closed, and so did immigrant-owned shops, including those in Karmel Mall, the Somali shopping center in Minneapolis. Tens of thousands marched downtown at 20 below zero. The next day, federal agents killed Alex Pretti, and the movement kept going. The administration was forced to pull the surge back. The people who rose up last winter learned who their enemies are and how to beat them back.
That strike is what the raid answers. A march can be waited out. A strike reaches the profits the whole system runs on, because nothing moves without the workers who stock the shelves, care for the sick and keep a city running. When Twin Cities workers walked off the job to defend their neighbors, they showed the bosses that the people who do the work can shut a city down. A Homeland Security official called the strike “beyond insane” and blamed “labor bosses.” A worker who can be deported, or stripped of citizenship, thinks twice before joining a union, walking a picket line or standing between ICE and a neighbor. The conspiracy charges, the surveillance and the threat to citizenship were built against immigrants and the people who defend them. They are ready for use against any workers who organize.
The surge left, but the prosecutors, the HSI investigators and the surveillance stayed. The fight moved off the streets and into the courthouse. The conspiracy charges against the Minneapolis 15 in June, the undercover agent outside Omar’s town hall in August and the raid on her home on Oct. 12 all came after the retreat. Thousands of armed agents could not make the Twin Cities submit. The government has no shortage of agents, prosecutors or judges. What it could not get was obedience, and every time the people refuse it, the government reaches for a harsher weapon.
The administration could not break the Twin Cities in the streets, so it is going after the community through one woman’s citizenship file. Citizenship did not protect anyone from Metro Surge. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were both citizens. What protected people was each other. The raid is an attempt to split the Somali community off from everyone else. The movement that beat the surge is being called back into the streets to refuse that split, and that is what will defend Ilhan Omar and every Somali family this government has put on probation.
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