Everything about the Trump administration’s pursuit of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar is bizarre. It’s bizarre that federal investigators are ignoring the 60-day “blackout period” before the election; it’s bizarre that it was Homeland Security Investigations agents who searched the Minnesota congresswoman’s home; and it’s bizarre that President Donald Trump himself is pretending he had nothing to do with this months after publicly demanding the very investigation that’s now underway.

For that matter, it’s also bizarre to see federal agents seize the laptop, cellphone and passport of a sitting member of Congress, despite highly dubious evidence of wrongdoing.

But perhaps most important of all is the endgame the president and his team have in mind. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The Trump administration’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe.

The multipronged effort is focused at least in part on how Omar obtained her citizenship after she arrived in the U.S. from Somalia decades ago. Investigators are focused both on the congresswoman and actions of her deceased father, some of the people familiar with the probe said. Nur Omar Mohamed brought his daughter and other family members to the U.S. from a refugee camp in Kenya in 1995.

Six years ago, in an act of performative racism, Trump used his social platform to call on Omar and some of her progressive colleagues to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” (Of the congresswomen the Republican targeted, only Omar was born outside the United States.)

For many years, “go back to where you came from” was the kind of ugly cliché one might expect to hear from the angry drunk at the end of the bar. In 2019 the overt racism was embraced publicly by the sitting president of the United States.

Six years after he flaunted his obvious and unapologetic bigotry, Trump’s position has taken a literal turn. Almost exactly a year after the Republican started demanding that Omar leave the U.S. altogether, his administration is reportedly now engaged in an actual effort to strip the Minnesotan of her American citizenship so that Trump can literally force her to “go back” to the country “from which she came.”

Throughout history, there have been countless clashes between presidents and members of Congress, but there is no modern precedent for an incumbent chief executive trying to misuse the levers of federal power in the hopes of kicking a sitting elected lawmaker out of the country.

Taking stock of the broader circumstances, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, an MS NOW legal analyst, explained via BlueSky, “This is about Ilhan Omar. But it’s also about control, intimidation and authoritarianism. The message is: we can do this to a member of Congress; no foreign-born American is safe. The administration is using fear as a tactic to discourage people from voicing opposition.”

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