‘Probably came to US illegally’: Who is Ilhan Omar, US representative targeted by Trump amid immigration crackdown?

Trump further escalated his rhetoric by announcing that he would “permanently ban migration from all third world countries.”

Who is Ilhan Omar?

Omar was born in Somalia and fled the country’s civil war at age eight, spending four years in a Kenyan refugee camp before arriving in the US in 1995. She became a US citizen in 2000 and was first elected to Congress in 2018. Now in her fourth term, she is one of the most prominent progressive lawmakers in Washington.

For years, conservative activists have circulated an unverified claim that Omar married her biological brother to commit immigration fraud — an allegation originating on a Somali-American message board in 2016. Multiple investigations have found no evidence to support it.

Trump has repeatedly told Omar to “go back” to Somalia, including in a Truth Social post earlier this month. He also joked in September about sending her back, recounting a conversation with Somalia’s president in which he claimed the leader said he did not want her returned.

“You know I met the head of Somalia, did you know that?” he told reporters at the Oval Office in September. “And I suggested that maybe he’d like to take her back. He said ‘I don’t want her.’”

Omar, meanwhile, has dismissed threats and insinuations about her citizenship. “I have no worry,” she said in an interview last month. “I don’t know how they’d take away my citizenship and deport me… I’m not the 8-year-old who escaped war anymore. I’m grown. My kids are grown. I can go live wherever I want.”