Up until now, the Donald Trump-J. D. Vance administration has been busy weaponizing the US immigration system against fairly low-level political opponents: college students protesting US support for Israel's genocide, independent journalists applying scrutiny to government policies, or random tourists who happened to be critical of the president and his lackeys. Now it's taking the unprecedented step of turning it against a sitting member of Congress.
The federal raid on Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar's home carried out earlier this week has now all but officially been confirmed to be an immigration-related investigation trying to strip her of US citizenship and deport her, as sources separately relayed to Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. It is just the latest and most extreme case of Trump and his people using the US immigration system and the massive bureaucracy that exists to enforce it as a vehicle for political repression based on a thinly veiled excuse.
There's little doubt this is politically motivated. It's not just that Omar has already been investigated for this with no charges to show for it, that this immigration history has been a right-wing media obsession for years, or that Trump and his underlings — who have turned the Department of Justice into the president's personal vehicle for score-settling on his many grudges — have singled out Omar as a target for the better part of a decade, often by flinging around wild and unproven accusations about her immigration history and repeatedly threatening to deport her.
It's clearly politically motivated because they've been openly saying they would do exactly what is happening now. Besides Trump's constant threats to deport her, the wife of one of Trump's top advisers, Stephen Miller, reacted to the news of the raid by tweeting, "Promise made, promise kept," before swiftly deleting it. Vice President Vance declared seven months ago that Omar "definitely committed immigration fraud."
Vance is now saying that the White House isn't involved and that they simply want "to let the law, the facts drive this" — but immediately undercut this cleanup attempt by then railing against Omar for "hav[ing] such disdain and such rage at the country that gave her a better life," before reminding the interviewer they would "follow the law" if they discovered a crime. They get so excited at the idea of deporting one of their fiercest critics that they can't help themselves.
To put it plainly, Trump and company long ago decided that Omar is guilty of whatever they're going to accuse her of and that she should be exiled from her country. This raid and whatever investigation comes of it is, to them, just a formality.
No administration in modern memory has targeted a congressperson like this, and certainly not with weeks to go before she's up for reelection — since a criminal investigation, which may not even result in charges, let alone any guilty verdict, has the obvious potential to be a politically damaging "October surprise" (even if it ends up being completely free of substance).
The fact that they're carrying out this unprecedented move is a major escalation of two separate Trump-Vance administration policies. One is its transformation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in particular, into a tool for intimidating the many swaths of the country that do not like the president or his sidekick. (The raid was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE.) That approach has seen ICE kill at least three US citizens and many more noncitizens as well as illegally detain hundreds of citizens and deport around a dozen of them.
The less-well-known policy is the administration's push to turbocharge denaturalizations, which are now at unheard-of levels. The administration has eagerly publicized the cases where this has been aimed at violent criminals convicted for heinous crimes. But given that the investigation into Omar is being done with an eye to denaturalizing her, too, it raises the question of how many of these other denaturalization cases may be similarly politically driven.
It's worth remembering at this point that Vance gave his personal endorsement to a book that called for weaponizing the immigration system against the Right's political adversaries in exactly this way, with the Red Scares of last century as its model.
Ironically, as the Trump-Vance administration accelerates its preplanned crackdown on the Left, it's nakedly letting literally scores of right-wing criminals off the hook for their offenses.
A Reuters report earlier this week revealed how the White House has turned the presidential pardon into a system of personal patronage, trading clemency and a clean slate for past crimes for favors, which eighty-five mostly conservatives have benefited from so far — including a former Republican official who fundraised off of a dead police officer, then used the proceeds to buy herself plastic surgery and other goodies.
It also mirrors the Trump-Vance administration's policy toward Latin America. There it has freed a right-wing former president convicted of drug trafficking and otherwise politically gotten into bed with local alleged narcotraffickers while at the same time abducting a a left-wing leader on drug-trafficking charges, fueling a crackdown on other left-leaning officials in the region on similar grounds, and carrying out a campaign of indiscriminate murder in international waters on the basis of stopping the drug trade (which it has miserably failed at actually doing).
This is the Trump-Vance ethos in a nutshell: maximum pressure and punishment for political opponents spuriously accused of crimes and maximum leniency for actual criminals who happen to be the duo's political allies.
There is one more thing to say about this, which is that everything laid out here is, sadly, not the unique behavior of two particularly power-hungry right-wing officials in the United States. This is just arguably the most extreme instance of what has now become shamefully standard across Western democracies, whether governed by liberals or conservatives: of using the immigration system as a way to punish and silence individuals whose speech those in power disagree with, since immigration systems have a variety of legal loopholes and few to no real constitutional protections.
Look at what happened just this past week. Russian journalist and exiled Vladimir Putin critic Leonid Ragozin was officially notified that he was being expelled from Latvia, which he called home for more than a decade, by government decree — explicitly because of his critical reporting on the European role in the war in Ukraine, and likely also as belated political reprisal for years-old reporting that embarrassed the Latvian political elite. Meanwhile, former British diplomat Ian Proud was detained for hours at Heathrow airport and treated like a criminal — searched, fingerprints and DNA taken, electronics seized — under a recently passed (by the Labour government) anti-terrorism statute, all for the crime of having visited Russia to attend a conference.
Remember when Vance, at the beginning of his tenure, did a long, pompous speech tut-tutting European officials for being hostile to "the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion" and reminding them that "there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people"? And European officials responded with indignation that anyone would deign to dress them down on this subject?
Less than two years later, it's hard to know which of them was the bigger hypocrite — or even which of the two places Vance was describing in his speech.
[This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture.]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
