Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, during a news conference ahead of the State of the Union address in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 24, 2026.
Photo: Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Agents from the
Department of Homeland Security on Monday raided the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar ostensibly in connection with a criminal investigation into her childhood immigration to the United States. The raid was signed off on by a federal judge, apparently after a “
back-and-forth
” with federal law enforcement, and has been
condemned
by civil rights
groups
as highly suspect.
ICE Raid on Ilhan Omar Shows How Dangerous Two Years of Flailing Trump Could Get
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s targeting of Omar
escalated even further
as federal agents issued subpoenas to many of her relatives, including her sister Sahra Noor, and the Wall Street Journal reported the Trump administration’s
ultimate goal
is to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her. This obscene abuse of power comes
after years
of Trump targeting Omar with threats,
racist smears
, intimidation, and calls for her deportation.
But with rare exception, the response from the mainstream media’s pundit class has been largely muted, with the vast bulk of the coverage coming in the form of he said/she said, down-the-middle reporting. This is in stark contrast with how elite opinion-shapers responded with uniform outrage in the days after Trump’s also dubious raid on John Bolton, his former national security adviser and a neoconservative commentator, in August 2025. Both are part of a consistent pattern of Trump
weaponizing the Department of Justice
to attack his perceived enemies, yet only the latter solicited widespread media condemnation.
The very day of the Bolton raid, we saw scathing editorials from the
New York Times
,
Washington Post
, and
Wall Street Journal
. Over the next week, each of these newspapers also published separate pie
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