Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump repeated a racist conspiracy theory about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and called for Somali immigrants to be deported to “perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth.”
“Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90%, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia. ‘Congresswoman’ Omar, an ungrateful loser who only complains and never contributes, is one of the many scammers. Did she really marry her brother? Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness. Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
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Omar, a frequent Trump critic and progressive Congresswoman, is a Somali refugee and the first Somali American to serve in Congress. She first came to the United States in 1995 as an asylee, and became a citizen at 17 in 2000.
She is also the target of various racist conspiracy theories. Trump refers to one that was going around since 2016, that Omar married her brother in order to obtain U.S. citizenship. The claim has been widely debunked.
This is not the first time Trump has invoked the racist conspiracy theory. In 2019, he made the allegations on national television during a White House press gaggle.
“There’s a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it. I hear that she was married to her brother,” Trump said at the time. “I don’t know but I’m sure that somebody would be looking at that.”
Though Omar applied for a marriage license in 2002 to wed Ahmed Hirsi, they did not go through with a civil wedding and the license was never filed. In 2009, after Omar had become a citizen, she wed British national Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, though the couple separated in 2011 with Omar officially filing for divorce in 2017. Omar is, obviously, not related to either Hirsi or Elmi.
The claim first appeared on a Somali-community discussion forum and was picked up by a conservative blog, Powerline, though no evidence beyond the original post was offered.
“For someone like me, who left a war-torn country at the age of 8, who got refugee status to come to America, where in the world am I finding a sibling 15 years, 20 years later to seek to do what people accuse me of?” Omar told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2018, according to Snopes.
Trump’s reference to Minnesota fraud is about a video that was released this week by YouTuber Nick Shirley. Shirley’s video alleges widespread fraud in Minnesota’s child care industry. The video has gone viral among right-wing politicians and influencers with over 2 million views, according to CNN.
The video claims that child care centers, primarily those run by Somali immigrants, are not actually providing services. However, CBS News reports that not all of the locations cited by Shirley had active licenses. Of the active centers, state regulators visited them all and found no recorded evidence of fraud.
Image via Reuters