The Real Stakes of the Ilhan Omar Case

The New Yorker · Rozina Ali · 2026-10-30 10:00 UTC

Rozina Ali on the Trump Administration’s allegations of immigration fraud against Representative Ilhan Omar and the push surrounding denaturalization.

A complete prohibition on immigration by Muslims was blatantly unconstitutional, but that did not stop Trump, during his first week in office, from signing an executive order that banned travel from a list of Muslim-majority countries. After several legal challenges, Proclamation 9645, the third iteration of the policy, which the White House had expanded to include two non-Muslim countries—Venezuela and North Korea—was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts, in his 5–4 opinion, noted that the Court must consider not only the President’s contentious statements but also the executive’s “authority” on matters of immigration and national security.

Meanwhile, in a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the Court could not disregard the President’s racist intentions. “What began as a policy explicitly ‘calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ has since morphed into a ‘Proclamation’ putatively based on national-security concerns,” she wrote. “But this new window dressing cannot conceal an unassailable fact: the words of the President and his advisers create the strong perception that the Proclamation is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers.”

Questions of contamination and concealment appear newly relevant in light of a raid by more than a dozen federal agents on Representative Ilhan Omar’s home in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. It was six o’clock in the morning when Omar, who had just returned from a trip a few hours earlier, awoke to sounds of banging on her front and back doors. As Omar relayed in a recent interview with MS NOW, she was confused and disoriented: She and her husband were presented with a search warrant by officers with Homeland Security Investigations, an immigration-enforcement agency that typically pursues crimes such as drug or child trafficking. Over the next several hours, the agents scoured each room of Omar’s home, taking with them seventeen items, including her phones, a daughter’s old cellphone, and her husband’s camera, as well as a Somali-language phrase book.

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