# Ilhan Omar Democratic representative for Minneapolis since 2019 (b. 1982, Mogadishu), one of the first two Muslim women in Congress and the first Somali-American, a member of the progressive "Squad," and — for the purposes of this vault — the single most durable target the American right has: the figure invoked when the argument needs an immigrant, a Muslim, a woman and a leftist in one person. She came to the United States in 1995 as a refugee after four years in a Kenyan camp, became a citizen at 17, worked as a nutrition educator and city-council aide, and won a state House seat in 2016 before taking Keith Ellison's congressional seat in 2018. She has won every primary and general election since by wide margins — the August 11, 2026 primary against a former DHS prosecutor running on moderation included — and her district is among the safest in the country. ## The target The attacks come in a recognizable cycle. The 2019 "some people did something" remark about 9/11 and the "all about the Benjamins" tweet on AIPAC produced the first, with the House's resolution on antisemitism (which did not name her) and the President's "send her back" rally in July 2019; the 2023 Republican House removed her from the Foreign Affairs Committee on a party-line vote; and after the [[Assassination of Charlie Kirk]] in September 2025, a resolution by Rep. [[Nancy Mace]] to censure her and strip her committee seats — for an interview in which she called the killing "mortifying," then criticized Kirk's positions — was tabled on September 17, 2025 when four Republicans (Flood, Hurd, McClintock, Mills) joined the Democrats. Mace's accompanying statement said Omar "should be stripped of her seat and her citizenship" and "deported to Somalia," which is the point: the argument against her has always been about whether she belongs, and the denaturalization rhetoric of 2025–26 made that explicit. The [[Islamophobia]] page has the machinery; [[Nativism]] the older version; the [[2026 Midterms Hub]] the Minnesota context. ## The record On policy she is a conventional progressive — Medicare for All, student-debt cancellation, the Green New Deal — with a foreign-policy profile that is the actual source of the establishment's discomfort: votes against sanctions and arms sales, criticism of Israel's conduct in Gaza, opposition to the Venezuela intervention and to the Iran war. Her 2019 tweets were retracted with an apology; the underlying critique was not, and it is now closer to her party's median than it was. The vault does not adjudicate the antisemitism charge; it records that the charge and the "send her back" chant arrived together, and that the people making the first were not always the people making the second. ## See Also - [[Assassination of Charlie Kirk]] · [[Nancy Mace]] · [[Charlie Kirk]] · [[Islamophobia]] · [[Nativism]] - [[2026 Midterms Hub]] · [[Keith Ellison]] · [[Tim Walz]] · [[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]] · [[Rashida Tlaib]] · [[AIPAC]]