Somalia-born Rep. Ilhan Omar said that her son was pulled over by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and asked to provide proof of citizenship.
“After he made a stop at Target, he did get pulled over by ICE agents, and once he was able to produce his passport ID, they did let him go,” Ms. Omar said in an interview with CBS Minnesota affiliate WCCO Sunday Morning.
Ms. Omar, Minnesota Democrat, came to the country as a refugee at the age of 12, having fled Somalia’s civil war, and became a U.S. citizen in 2000.
She became the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2018.
This was not the first time her family came in contact with ICE, Ms. Omar said, and she blamed racial profiling by law enforcement agents.
“They are looking for young men who look Somali that they think are undocumented,” she said.
She said ICE previously entered a mosque where her son and others were praying.
Although they “didn’t do anything,” Ms. Omar said she “had to remind him just how worried I am, because all of these areas that they are talking about are areas where he could possibly find himself in, and they are racially profiling, they are looking for young men who look Somali that they think are undocumented.”
In response to Ms. Omar’s Sunday interview, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said ICE acts with the “utmost professionalism.”
“Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals are simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens,” she said in a statement.
Ms. Omar recently sent two congressional inquiries into ICE’s immigration crackdown last week.
One was sent to the Department of Homeland Security about this month’s immigration operations in the Twin Cities. She accused ICE of “blatant racial profiling, an egregious level of unnecessary force, and activity that appears designed for social media rather than befitting a law enforcement agency.”
In another letter sent to the agency, she joined Democratic lawmakers to inquire about President Trump’s pledge to “immediately” end temporary legal protections for Somalis living in Minnesota.
Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More than 80,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.
Ms. Omar has claimed that “over 90% of Somalis in America are U.S. citizens,” a statement that mirrors an American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau, which estimates about 8.4% of Somalis in the country are not citizens.
Previously, the president said, “I don’t want them in our country,” referring to Somali immigrants, and called Ms. Omar “garbage.”
“We always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right?” Mr. Trump said last week. “Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
Ms. Omar clapped back in her on-air interview, calling it “disturbing” and “creepy” to have the president “obsessed with you.”
Mr. Trump’s interest in Somalis in Minnesota was piqued by a report last month from the conservative Manhattan Institute that found billions of dollars in public benefit fraud among the Somali community, and argued that some have gone to fund a terrorist organization in Somalia.
“Here in the United States, we don’t blame the crimes of an individual on a whole community,” Ms. Omar told WCCO on Sunday. “We are, as Minnesotans, also outraged, the fact that our tax dollars were defrauded.”
