AM Dispatch: Ilhan Omar Don't Scare
Plus, H-1B social media vetting starts today; loser ICE husband arrested for impersonating agent wife; death toll in iCE custody soars to 25; Florida & Minnesota residents rally for migrants; & more.
WASHINGTON — The package that came to Ilhan Omar’s office four years ago said “The Patriarchy will rise again. Merry fucking Christmas.” Capitol Police tested the suspicious substance inside and declared it safe, which in this city means you get right back to work like nothing happened.
Omar was 39 then. Most of her staff were Gen Z on their first job out of college, still believing that public service meant something more than opening mail that might kill them. “This is their first job,” Omar told me that day in 2021, standing outside the House chamber. “Many of them are still idealistic.”
Now it’s December 2025, and the President of the United States is calling Somali immigrants “garbage” and suggesting Omar herself should be deported. Never mind that she’s a U.S. citizen. Never mind that she was elected to Congress four times now. In Trump’s America, simply being born in Mogadishu is apparently a deportable offense.
Omar calls his fixation “creepy” and “unsettling” — and she’s right. She says he needs professional help. She’s being polite. What she’s really reminding us is that the president is a dangerous felon. “We experience these threats at a level no other member of Congress experiences,” Omar told me four years ago when the U.S. Capitol Police logged roughly 9,000 threats against federal lawmakers, a doubling of what it had been before the first Trump presidency with offices like Omar’s receiving the lion’s share.
For 2025, the department has not yet published a finalized, full‑year count, but officials have said they are on pace to reach roughly 14,000 threats by the end of the year, a sharp increase from 2024.
That’s what happens when the President calls people garbage. When he says Somalis are trash. When his senior advisor Stephen Miller uses rhetoric that Omar said “reminds me the way Nazis described people”—the same language they used about Jews, Irish, Italians, everyone who showed up at Ellis Island with the wrong last name.
Trump does this when he’s losing. Omar’s figured that out. She told CNN that Trump “frequently resorts to extremely bigoted, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and racist language when he seeks to blame others and distract from his own shortcomings.” The immigration raids aren’t working. The tariffs are hurting American business. His defense secretary’s facing war crimes accusations. He’s protecting guys from the Epstein files.
So Trump goes after a Black Muslim woman from Somalia because it plays well with the worst people in America. Omar said: “He knows he is failing, so he’s trying to divert attention by stoking bigotry.”
But Omar’s not hiding. When they come for you, you stand there and remind everyone who you are. “We are indeed ethnically Somali, but we are also Americans,” she told CBS. “We are citizens, we contribute to society, and we are integral to this nation.”
When they gave her a chance to respond to Trump directly, she said: “Your message of bigotry is not working. Your intimidations are not going to work on the Somali community who have survived so much.”
The Somali community survived a civil war. They survived refugee camps. They survived the journey to Minnesota where the cold hits minus-20 in December. They’re not scared of a failed real estate developer from Queens.
But Omar knows something the rest of us should remember: “Hateful language and dehumanization can incite dangerous behavior from those who listen to the president.” What keeps her up at night, she says, is “the fear that individuals who share my identities—Black, Muslim, immigrant—will bear the brunt of this rhetoric.”
This is the price she pays in America for being the first Muslim in Congress, and a black woman to boot, who won’t shut up about what’s right. And that’s why Trump’s so mad. Because after all the garbage talk and the deportation threats and the Nazi rhetoric from Stephen Miller, Minnesota keeps electing her to Congress.
That must really burn them up.
H-1B visa appointments cancelled through March as social media vetting begins
Starting today, the State Department is implementing an expanded “online presence review” vetting process forcing cancellation and rescheduling of H-1B and H-4 visa appointments. Many applicants are reporting their interviews have been postponed until March 2026 or later. Immigration attorneys warned anyone with appointments on or after December 15 should prepare for significant delays and be unable to return to the United States on their original timeline.
Why it matters: The social media surveillance regime is now operational—and it’s destroying the H-1B system. Three-month delays mean jobs lost, families stranded, and skilled workers locked out while consular officers dig through Instagram posts.
WATCH: ICE Husband Arrested for Using Wife’s Service Vehicle to Impersonate Agent
Nicholas Cabral, the loser husband of a South Jersey ICE agent on a 20-day deployment, is in deep shit: