It won’t stop with Ilhan Omar |
Up until now, the Donald Trump–J. D. Vance administration has been busy weaponizing the US immigration system against fairly low-level political opponents: college students protesting US support for Israel’s genocide, independent journalists applying scrutiny to government policies, and random tourists who happened to be critical of the president and his lackeys. Now it’s taking the unprecedented step of turning it against a sitting member of Congress. The federal raid on Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home carried out earlier this week has now all but officially been confirmed to be an immigration-related investigation trying to strip her of US citizenship and deport her, as sources separately relayed to Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. It is just the latest and most extreme case of Trump and his people using the US immigration system and the massive bureaucracy that exists to enforce it as a vehicle for political repression based on a thinly veiled excuse. There’s little doubt this is politically motivated. It’s not just that Omar has already been investigated for this with no charges to show for it, that this immigration history has been a right-wing media obsession for years, or that Trump and his underlings — who have turned the Department of Justice into the president’s personal vehicle for score-settling on his many grudges — have singled out Omar as a target for the better part of a decade, often by flinging around wild and unproven accusations about her immigration history and repeatedly threatening to deport her. It’s clearly politically motivated because they’ve been openly saying they would do exactly what is happening now. Besides Trump’s constant threats to deport her, the wife of one of Trump’s top advisers, Stephen Miller, reacted to the news of the raid by tweeting, “Promise made, promise kept,” before swiftly deleting it. Vice President Vance declared seven months ago that Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud.” |