WASHINGTON — The migrant congresswoman’s son was coming out of Target with his mother’s grocery list when the two ICE agents pulled him over. Adnan Omar, 22 years old, born in Washington D.C., raised in Minnesota, suddenly had to prove he belonged in America because his skin was the wrong color and his mother was the wrong religion.
“Passport,” he told them. He carries it now. Every day. To the grocery store. To the mall. To the mosque. This is what it means to be Ilhan Omar’s son in December 2025, when the President of the United States calls your people “garbage” and sends federal agents to your neighborhood to prove it.
His mother found out the same way any mother would—her kid called her, shaken. But Ilhan Omar isn’t any mother. She’s a member of Congress who spent four years of her childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp stepping over bodies to get water. She’s seen worse than ICE agents outside a Target.
She wrote a letter. Not a Tweet, not a cable news hit—a formal letter to the Department of Homeland Security documenting what amounts to racial profiling of a sitting Congresswoman’s family. Then she went back to work.
That’s the thing about Omar that drives her enemies crazy. She won’t flinch. Won’t hide. Won’t modulate her voice or soften her edges or apologize for existing. Four years ago, someone sent a package to her office saying “The Patriarchy will rise again. Merry fucking Christmas.” Capitol Police tested it. Declared it safe. She went back to answering constituent mail like nothing happened.
Most of her staff then were twenty-somethings on their first job out of college who thought public service meant drafting legislation, not opening packages that might explode. “Many of them are still idealistic,” she told me in 2021. She wasn’t being cynical. She was being realistic. She knew what the job cost because she’d been paying it since she got here.
The threats logged against her office—hundreds in 2021, climbing toward thousands this year—would make most people quit. Would make most people reasonable. Would make most people think maybe if I just tone it down, maybe if I just stop asking Elliott Abrams about war crimes, maybe if I just vote the way leadership wants, they’ll leave me alone.
But that’s not who Ilhan Omar is. That’s not what you learn when you survive Mogadishu at eight years old. When you watch your aunt die of malaria in a refugee camp because there’s no medicine. When you land in Arlington, Virginia, and kids press gum into your hijab and push you down stairs for wearing it.
She has learned that making yourself smaller doesn’t make them hate you less. So she stand up straight and you remind them: “We are indeed ethnically Somali, but we are also Americans. We are citizens, we contribute to society, and we are integral to this nation.”
She say it plainly. No apologies. No hedging. Because you know something about America that people born here sometimes forget: This country was built by people who weren’t welcome. By Irish and Italians and Jews and everyone else who showed up at Ellis Island with the wrong last name and the wrong God and too much hope.
When a President calls your people “garbage,” when he suggests maybe you should be deported despite being a U.S. citizen elected to Congress four times, when his senior advisor uses language that “reminds me the way Nazis described people”—you know it’s not about you.
“Trump frequently resorts to extremely bigoted, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and racist language when he seeks to blame others and distract from his own shortcomings,” she told CNN. Translation: The man’s losing and he needs someone to punch down on.
The immigration raids aren’t working. The tariffs are hurting business. His defense secretary’s facing war crimes accusations. So he goes after a Black Muslim woman from Somalia because it plays well with people who need someone to hate.
But here’s what Trump doesn’t understand about the Somali community in Minnesota, about the people in Omar’s district who now carry their passports to Target: They survived a civil war. They survived refugee camps. They survived the journey to a state where it hits minus-20 in December. They’re not scared of a failed real estate developer from Queens.
And they’re certainly not scared of ICE agents stopping their kids outside grocery stores.
Omar’s not hiding. She’s on CBS saying: “Your message of bigotry is not working. Your intimidations are not going to work on the Somali community who have survived so much.” She’s in committee hearings grilling diplomats. She’s writing letters to DHS. She’s doing her job.
That’s the quiet dignity they can’t stand. Not the screaming. Not the drama. Just showing up every day, doing the work, refusing to disappear.
After all the packages. After all the threats. After all the rallies where they chant about deporting her. After Stephen Miller’s Nazi rhetoric and Trump’s garbage talk and now ICE agents questioning her son’s citizenship outside a Target—Minnesota keeps electing her to Congress.
Four times now.
That must really burn them up.
