The Omar Case Encapsulates MAGA’s Attack on Citizenship

The Trump administration has flailed at each of its major priorities. That includes, so far, its attempt to instill effective authoritarian rule: the Alien Enemies Act removals, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the occupations of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and others — they’re all marred by the same incompetence.

The buffoonery on display would be funny were it not so dangerous: it’s left lives ruined, and people killed. In the case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), it’s threatening to strip naturalized citizens of basic constitutional rights.

I’ve spent the last two years writing about the Trump administration’s plans to denaturalize large swaths of people. For the administration and its ideologues, it’s about more than denaturalizations, which Supreme Court precedent and the difficulty of bringing the cases will likely restrict: it’s about diminishing the First Amendment rights of naturalized citizens, while threatening the rest of the country.

“When you have high-profile, vindictive cases about somebody’s citizenship, it really makes citizenship feel insecure for every naturalized citizen,” Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor at Case Western who has studied denaturalization cases, told me. “It means that any naturalized citizen is going to be very cautious about criticizing the government.”

The Trump administration has spent the last several years laying the groundwork for these kinds of cases. Stephen Miller broached the idea on the campaign trail in 2024; since then, it’s been used by right-wingers to threaten New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, pro-Palestine protestors, and anyone whose ancestry can be traced to people who immigrated in the last half century.

Last year, TPM first reported, the DOJ opened the door to using politics as grounds to denaturalize people through a little-noticed memo. There, it said the same kind of national security justification it applied in its attempts to deport people like Mahmoud Khalil could be used in deciding whether to push to denaturalize someone.

Despite the administration’s ambitions, the legal hurdles are high. Supreme Court precedent bars most denaturalizations based on speech — rather, the government needs to show that there was an omission or falsehood on the naturalization paperwork of such magnitude that it would have prevented the person from getting citizenship had the truth been shared with immigration authorities. To that end, the Trump administration has focused its denaturalization surge mostly on people with criminal records that went undisclosed at the time they received citizenship. But in other cases, including one notable one involving a Minneapolis man of Somali descent, the DOJ is using a McCarthy-era law to attempt to strip him of his citizenship. In that case, the administration argues that actions the man took after he gained citizenship are enough to warrant denaturalization.

It is unclear what case the administration thinks it has against Omar because no case has been filed. Per multiple media outlets, Homeland Security Investigations searched her apartment and seized her phone as part of an investigation into immigration fraud. Warrants went out to her relatives; per CNN, they came after a court fight in which a magistrate judge narrowed what the DOJ could examine. Per the Wall Street Journal, this is all with a view towards potentially moving to denaturalize and deport her.

The basis of the investigation is reportedly that Omar was not 17, but in fact was 18, when her father became a U.S. citizen. A minor whose parent becomes a U.S. citizen naturalizes with them; adulthood means applying separately. As several outlets have noted, Omar’s first country of Somalia has been wracked by wars and competing governments: accurate records are hard to come by.

The theory that her father put down the wrong date was first popularized by a right-wing wing activist named Aliena Jeanene (AJ) Kern. She’s described Omar as a “foreign nationalist,” and spent years trying to persuade people that Omar was never properly naturalized, and should therefore be stripped of her citizenship.

Kern, a onetime Congressional candidate in Minnesota, appears to have embraced QAnon during Trump’s first term, per Facebook posts reviewed by TPM. At some point, she began to request records from USCIS and other government agencies about Omar’s family’s citizenship records. This, combined with an active X account, snowballed into appearances over the past year on right-wing outlets including NewsMax, AlphaNews, and the Daily Mail. Kern also challenged Omar in the 2022 Democratic primary, attempting to use it as a vehicle to disqualify Omar and spread her theory.

It’s not clear whether Kern’s allegations served as the basis for the federal government’s searches or otherwise tipped off Trump administration officials. Kiersten Piels, a DOJ spokesperson, declined to comment.

But what is clear is that the focus on Omar goes beyond Kern. To Robertson, the law professor, the case is reminiscent of the successful effort to strip anarchist Emma Goldman of her citizenship in 1919. There, federal authorities moved to denaturalize Goldman based on her marriage to a man who had allegedly obtained his citizenship via fraudulent means. The motive behind Goldman’s denaturalization was her speech, Robertson said, even though it was based legally on her having received citizenship via her husband.

Since then, there’s been more than a century of law and practice aimed at preventing denaturalizations over speech in almost all situations. But to MAGA, citizenship for those not born here is conditional: as Vice President JD Vance said last year to the Claremont Institute, citizenship isn’t about principles. It’s about “heritage.”