When people act consistently terrible or wacky all of the time, it’s sometimes too easy to get inured to things we should definitely not be inured to. For instance, if I’m out shopping and the State Street Preacher calls me a Jezebel whore who is going to burn in hell for all eternity, I’m gonna shrug that shit off and continue on my merry way to Nordstrom Rack.
In that same vein, it’s often hard to get too het up about every terrible thing that Trump and his administration do, because to do so would be exhausting. Indeed, that’s literally the Steve Bannon “flood the zone with shit” strategy.
But the early morning raid last week on Ilhan Omar’s house is so far beyond the pale that we cannot stop yelling about it, lest they decide that this is something they can normalize now. They’ve always acted like 15-year-old edgelords, and now they’re more or less SWATting people like 15-year-old edgelords, and that just can’t become acceptable. That doesn’t get to be a three-day news cycle and then it’s swept back under the rug forever.
Omar discussed the raid with Chris Hayes on MSNOW on Wednesday night, calm and classy AF as usual. Certainly a lot calmer than I would be if I now had to get all my shit together and move because the Trump administration raided my home and now all the terrible people who regularly sent me death threats know where I live.
But Omar knows that she did nothing wrong, and that the whole purpose of the raid was to rattle her and to show the MAGA creeps who are obsessed with her that the Trump administration is working to make their dreams come true. After all, politicians can only pretend she’s done something illegal somehow, in some capacity, for a certain amount of time before those people start asking why they haven’t done anything about this imaginary crime yet. I mean, hell, they’re still waiting for their QAnon military tribunals (except, of course, for the ones who claim those tribunals have been happening all along and all of the bad people have been replaced by clones).
“They've done this sort of full press. They kept alluding to the fact that something was going to happen to me,” Omar said. “And I think a lot of their right-wing influencers who seem to have direct connection to not just the president, but his orbit, I think they were, like, starting to lose faith that these were empty promises and they had to do something, I believe, to say, ‘Hey, look, we raided her house.’ You know, now you can feel comfortable that we are doing something..”
That “something” ended up being searching her entire house and coming out with just 17 things probably meant to make it look like they at least found something. In addition to Omar’s current phone, they also took old phones they had around the house, including her daughter’s old phone, her husband’s old notebooks, and an old-timey camera he got from his uncle at graduation and used to document his time in the Navy. They also took a children’s Somali phrasebook her husband was using to learn the language.
Just to remind you — the thing they are trying to prove here is that Omar and her father lied about her age and claimed she was 17 instead of 18 when he naturalized so that she could get citizenship automatically through him, or that he lied by omission on his naturalization records by not mentioning his military service. Why “proof” of these things would be found in any of the things they took is truly a mystery. Indeed, the only evidence of the former is “We would like for this to be true, so let’s just claim it is.”
As Omar noted in the interview, the Homeland Security Investigations agents would actually have more access to information related to her emigration and naturalization at their office than they could possibly find at her home.
The raid, as you may have heard, began at 6 a.m. on a Monday morning. The warrant stated that they could have shown up any time between 6 and 10 a.m., but Omar believes they deliberately chose 6 a.m. so that she and her family would feel scared being woken up out of their sleep like that. Having only had two hours sleep due to her plane getting in late, Omar assumed that there must be a fire or something very serious when they started banging on her door that morning. What else would she think? That a neighbor was there to borrow a cup of sugar?
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Ultimately, unless they plant some evidence somehow in that Somali phrasebook — a letter from her deceased father saying “I did it! I faked my daughter’s age and also lied about my work history in order to defraud the US Government into letting me become a citizen!” or something to that effect — the only thing they’re accomplishing here is terrorizing a duly elected United States representative and her family and throwing red meat at their base in hopes that they will focus more on that than their own economic misfortune.
And those weirdos are already eating enough raw red meat.
This needs to be a much bigger scandal, if only so they don’t go and try it on someone else, or just start SWATting every Democrat on the Hill for funsies. I certainly wouldn’t put that (or anything else at this point) past them.
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It's *such* a bogus argument - if her father (who is dead, BTW) lied about her age on his paperwork, they'd have a hell of a time proving it considering, again, that he's dead.
But hey, yesterday Todd Blanche said the 60-day DOJ guideline only applies if the "purpose" of a raid on a political opponent is about the politics. And Todd Blanche wouldn't *lie* to us would he?
They also arrested Louise Lucas, for gerrymander and third degree uppity.
https://bluevirginia.us/2026/10/breaking-powerful-va-state-sen-louise-lucas-in-federal-custody-in-connection-with-a-bribery-and-racketeering-scheme-according-to-the-trump-doj/