Chuck Schumer Once Decried GOP ‘Silence’ on Trump’s Racist Attacks on Ilhan Omar. Now He’s the Silent One. 

On the morning of July 18, 2019, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered an impassioned speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate in defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). The previous night, at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, President Donald Trump had sent thousands of his supporters into a fascist frenzy when he called on Omar to “leave” America, reupping a call he’d made earlier that week for the congresswoman to “go back” where she came from. The white nationalist subtext of Trump’s speech was clear: Omar, one of the president’s most outspoken opponents, a Black and Muslim woman who became a naturalized U.S. citizen after her family fled war-torn Somalia, wasn’t really American. 

The MAGA crowd broke into a chant. “Send her back!” they screamed in unison. Footage of the incident went viral, instantly emblematic of a five-alarm fire in American politics.   

“Despicable!” Schumer said during his speech on the Senate floor, raising his voice. “And eerily familiar to what happens in dictatorships.” The Senate Minority Leader dressed down the president for appealing to the “worst instincts” of his supporters, and for letting them indulge in “one of the oldest and ugliest racist attacks against Americans of color.”  Schumer lambasted his Republican colleagues too, for not having the “honor, the decency, the courage” to tell Trump to stop.  

“Our Republican friends are silent,” Schumer added, before intoning: “History will show this. This is a moment.” 

Eight years later, as Trump attempts to make the MAGA crowd’s “Send her back!” chant into a reality, it’s Schumer who’s silent. 

It’s been 14 long days since agents from Homeland Security Investigations and the Department of Justice raided Omar’s Washington D.C. home, part of an investigation — per the Wall Street Journal —  that seeks to denaturalize and deport Omar over dubious, conspiracy theory-laden allegations of immigration fraud. While various Democratic figures, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (R-NY) and former President Barack Obama, have issued statements denouncing the raid as dangerous and politically motivated, Schumer has been conspicuously absent from the effort to show Omar solidarity. The senator has issued no statements or granted any interviews about the attempt to forcibly expel an elected official, belonging to his own political party, from the country. 

Schumer’s office did not respond to TPM’s repeated requests for comment. 

The minority leader’s silence has led to speculation that one factor may be Omar’s stance on Israel, which she has said is committing genocide in Gaza. Schumer and Omar are on separate sides of one of the most fundamental faultlines in Democratic politics, with Schumer one of the country’s most ardent advocates, and Omar one of its harshest critics. For this reason, as Jeet Heer at The Nation notes, “establishment Democrats such as Schumer have often kept their distance” from Omar.

Still, Schumer came to Omar’s defense in January when a man attacked the congresswoman during a political event in Minnesota. The man, recently sentenced to 14 months in prison for the assault, lunged at the congresswoman, spraying her with liquid from a syringe. “The attack on Rep. Omar tonight was a despicable act of political violence and intimidation,” Schumer wrote on X. “I am glad Rep. Omar is OK, and I thank USCP and local police for their quick action to apprehend the suspect.” 

What the Trump administration is doing to Omar now is also arguably an act of political violence. Beyond the threat of being denaturalized and deported, Omar revealed in an interview last week that she and her family have decided to move from the D.C. home that HSI agents raided. Omar is a frequent target of death threats, and the raid helped publicize her address. “Oviously, I can’t continue to live there,” she told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes, explaining that she was worried about the safety of her children. 

That the Trump administration would pursue Omar in this way should be no surprise for Schumer. Trump has repeatedly referred to the congresswoman in the most alarming, dehumanizing terms, calling her “garbage” and “scum.” In a New York Times interview earlier this year he called for her to be “immediately thrown out of Congress,” denaturalized, and “sent back to her country.” The Washington Post also revealed this month that in 2019 the Trump administration tasked Homeland Security Investigations with scrutinizing Omar’s immigration records, but “ultimately determined there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing.”

The two most prominent Democrats to speak up in defense of Omar this month are close allies of Schumer’s, and both put the raid on the congresswoman’s home in context of an alarming trend: Trump using the DOJ to target his political enemies — Omar being the latest in a long line of Trump rivals and critics facing investigations and prosecutions, including writer E. Jean Carroll, former FBI director James Comey, and Gen. Mark Milley, among others.

Rep. Jeffries called the raid on Omar’s home “deeply disturbing” and said it raised “serious questions about the continued corrupt weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump’s adversaries.” Former President Obama issued a lengthy statement that began: “It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.” 

Notably, neither of these statements mentioned other likely factors for the targeting of Omar: the president’s attacks on Somali-Americans, reinvigorated ahead of the midterms, and his rampant Islamophobia. Last winter, Trump sicced legions of federal agents on Minneapolis for Operation Metro Surge based on conspiracy theories, propagated by a murderer’s row of treacherous MAGA influencers, about fraud in the Somali immigrant community. Just this month, days before the raid on Omar’s home, he appeared to incite his followers to attack Somali-Americans. “The Somalians[sic] should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.”

Meanwhile the president and the wider MAGA movement, ahead of the midterm elections, have increasingly deployed the most explicit, ugly anti-Muslim messaging while on the campaign trail. “His name is actually Abduladadalalalala,” Trump recently said at a rally about Abuld el-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, who happens to be Muslim. “It’s Adulbabababababa Mohammed Al-Sayed. So his middle name is Mohammed. So I was right. He’s a jihadist.”

And just look at these recent quotes from GOP lawmakers, recently compiled by Mother Jones: 

“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” says Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee.

“No more Muslims immigrating to America,” says Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas. 

“We need more Islamophobia, not less,” says Rep. Randy Fine of Florida. 

“Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic,” says Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. 

“No more Muslims,” says Rep. Chip Roy of Texas. 

“No more Islamic immigration,” says Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. “Denaturalize, deport, repeat.”

“I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult,” says Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith of Indiana. 

“It is time to let your elected officials know exactly how you feel about the infiltration of Islam into our communities,” says Rep. Keith Self of Texas. 

“We must IMMEDIATELY BAN all ISLAM immigrants and DEPORT every single Islamist who is living among us just waiting to attack,” says Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

“Muslims need to be treated like enemy combatants,” says Laura Loomer, of Mar-a-Lago.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director at the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told TPM in a statement that he “would certainly urge Senator Schumer to join many of his colleagues in denouncing the Trump administration’s partisan and punitive witch hunt into Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, which is part of a broader campaign to smear Somali Americans, American Muslims, and everyone else the White House considers a political opponent.” 

“Because Senator Schumer is the Senate Democratic leader,” Mitchell said, “many of his colleagues and many Americans want and expect to hear from him when a member of Congress faces this sort of abuse at the hands of the Trump administration.” 

Zaynab Mohamed, a Somali immigrant who represents Minneapolis as a Democrat in Minnesota’s state Senate, told the Intercept that the attack on Omar is reminiscent of “what happens in a dictatorship.” 

“If the president can threaten to denaturalize and deport a member of Congress, no one is safe,” she told the outlet. “This is a test of our democracy, and even Republicans should be speaking out about it. If we don’t defend the rights of Ilhan Omar, Somali-Americans, immigrants, and Trump’s political targets, we lose everything.”

It is, in other words, a crucial moment to stand up for Omar. Those who don’t will be remembered. To quote Schumer himself, from his speech on the Senate in 2019: “History will show this. This is a moment.”