Around 6 AM on Monday, October 12, roughly two dozen federal agents raided the Washington, D.C., residence of Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and the first Somali American member of Congress. The raid was part of the Trump administration’s sprawling investigation centered on Omar’s citizenship status. Over the past two weeks, federal officials have seized her phone, passport, notebooks, and computers. They’ve issued grand jury subpoenas to her family members. They’ve floated the possibility of criminal charges and prison time, and claimed that the probe may allow the Trump administration to strip Omar of her citizenship and facilitate her deportation.
Back in 2019, the last time the Trump administration directed federal authorities to comb through Omar’s immigration records, they found no evidence of wrongdoing. But actual legal wrongdoing is not the point. What’s “wrong” for Trump is the idea that a Black and Muslim woman he deems inferior could come to the United States and be granted rights as his equal.
Omar arrived in the United States in 1995 as a 12-year-old refugee of the Somali Civil War, and was naturalized as an American citizen in 2000. For years, Trump has disparaged Omar and other Somali Americans as “garbage,” and claimed that people from “the worst countries” should not come to the United States and start “telling us about the Constitution.”
Under federal law, “having opinions about the Constitution” does not appear on the list of permissible reasons to revoke someone’s citizenship. Congress has authorized the Justice Department to pursue civil denaturalization proceedings only when the government alleges that someone should not have become a citizen in the first place—for example, by procuring that status “by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” Longstanding Supreme Court precedent requires the government to prove those allegations with “clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence which does not leave the issue in doubt.”
The Supreme Court has also recognized that “citizenship obtained through naturalization is not a second-class citizenship,” and that a legal system in which “a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship” is “completely incongruous” with “the very nature of our free government.” Accordingly, actual revocations of citizenship have been exceedingly rare in the modern era: Fewer than 150 Americans were denaturalized between 1968 and 2013, compared to more than 18 million Americans who were naturalized in that same period. And when the rare denaturalization does occur, the targets have tended to be people suspected of war crimes or terrorism.
The Trump administration is trying to change that. Between 1990 and 2017, the Justice Department filed an average of 11 denaturalization cases per year. During Trump’s first term, the average rose to 25 cases per year. Now, the Trump administration has directed the Department of Homeland Security to “supply” the Justice Department with “100-200 denaturalization cases per month,” and the DOJ has further instructed all employees in the Civil Division to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings.”
Trump’s Justice Department is acting on these instructions. In April 2026, administration officials informed federal prosecutors that they had identified 384 Americans to target in a first wave of denaturalization cases. And earlier this month, the DOJ announced that it had filed 40 such denaturalization actions between August 21 and October 2. Additionally, researchers at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse have identified more than 100 denaturalization complaints filed by the Trump administration so far this year. Another database, maintained by Democracy Forward, shows nearly 200 civil denaturalization cases filed since January 2025.
The federal government’s ongoing attacks on Ilhan Omar are part of the Trump administration’s attempt to act as sole arbiter of who gets to be an American. It issues orders purporting to rescind birthright citizenship. It deploys federal agents to surveil, detain, and deport people of color en masse. And it is waging a denaturalization crusade that aims to make equal membership in society depend on race, ancestry, and Trump’s singular will.
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