elle ☆

No, we have no sympathy in any way, shape or form for the socialist left-wing nonsense that Rep. Ilhan Omar peddles day-in-and-day-out on Capitol Hill. But the predawn raid on her home early this AM represents Trumpian political grandstanding and weaponization of the machinery of justice every bit as despicable as what happened under "Joe Biden". This raid on the home of a sitting member of Congress, in fact, is no more justified than was the pre-dawn assault on Mar-a-Lago against a former president. First and foremost, this is not a case that even remotely involves criminal conduct by Rep. Ilhan Omar. By the accounts given to Fox News and confirmed at the high level by the Department of Justice, it is an investigation into immigration paperwork completed by her father 25-30 years ago when she was a child. But her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, has been dead since June 2020 and can no longer be held accountable, anyway. Still, the apparent reason for the raid turns on events from 1995 ( her family's refugee resettlement) and roughly 2000 (her father's naturalization), and on factual claims about her birth year, her mother’s death, and the loss of 45-years ago Somali records. So what we have is a “sins of the dead father” inquiry that turns on the following hideous level of historical trivia: *Statements or omissions on the family’s 1995 refugee resettlement paperwork under the Somalia program. *Statements on the father’s own naturalization application around 2000. *Whether Omar was in fact born on October 4, 1982 (the date used in congressional and Minnesota Legislative Reference Library records), which would have made her 17 and eligible for derivative citizenship. *Whether her mother actually died when Omar was about two years old (circa 1984), a fact relevant under older rules that generally required both parents to naturalize unless one was deceased. *Whether original birth and family records were lost during the families flight from Somalia in 1991 and the subsequent four years in a chaotic Kenyan refugee camp. Omar has long said she derived citizenship in 2000 as a minor when her father naturalized. Under the law applicable to children born before 1983, derivative citizenship for a minor is tethered to the validity of the parent’s naturalization. If a parent obtained citizenship through material, willful misrepresentation, that can in theory be used to challenge the child’s derived status. It is also a mechanism with high practical and legal barriers. The government must prove material, willful concealment or misrepresentation—not mere inconsistency, incomplete recollection from a war zone, or the absence of a birth certificate that was never issued or was destroyed. But a minor child who did not prepare or sign the forms, and Rep. Omar clearly didn't, and who has no demonstrated knowledge of any false statement, is not guilty of anything. Courts have historically required clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence of personal, not derivative, fraud before stripping citizenship. Moreover, the whole matter is moot, anyway. Had Omar been 19 years old with a living mother in 2000, she would simply have naturalized on her own after the ordinary five-year permanent-residence period that applies to most refugees. That is how large numbers of adult Somali refugees who arrived in the mid-1990s obtained citizenship. Derivative status for minors was a convenience and a legal pathway that existed precisely because many families arrived with young children. Treating the use of that pathway as inherently suspicious, three decades later, inverts the system that was applied to the entire community at the time. The truth is, there is no serious public-interest justification for a judicially authorized search of a sitting House member’s home in October of an election year in order to test whether her mother died in the mid-1980s or whether a birth year listed in official records is accurate. Yet that's the sum and substance behind this egregious miscarriage of justice. Even then,the purported fraud would have been committed by her father, who has been dead for six years and cannot be questioned. Original Somali civil records from a collapsed state are routinely unavailable. The entire exercise rests on the possibility that documents prepared by a now-deceased parent contained a material falsehood that a child then carried forward. This is the weaponization of federal investigative machinery taken to a new level of barking absurdity. Democrats spent years using selective investigations, leaks, and process as political tools against opponents. Doing the same thing now by a gang of DHS thugs wearing what amounts to red jerseys to raid the home of a sitting congresswoman on the basis of 25- to 30-year-old refugee paperwork and the death certificate of a woman who died when the congresswoman was a toddler is exactly the same thing the Dems did under the last administration. That is not accountability. It is pre-election grandstanding dressed up as law enforcement. If there is concrete, recent, personal evidence of fraud by Omar herself, then the Trumpians need to produce it. Fast. Until then, a search warrant aimed at the alleged paperwork of a man dead since 2020, for the purpose of litigating events from 1982–2000, does not serve the interest of justice. It serves a political narrative peddled by malefactors hiding behind the color of law. And, no, Omar didn't marry her brother, either. That canard has been debunked so thoroughly that only the densest MAGA Hats credit it.