The revocation of a political opponent’s citizenship has long been a tool of authoritarian repression.
The Soviet Union stripped Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the dissident author, of his citizenship in 1974 and deported him to West Germany. Czechoslovakia revoked the citizenship of Milan Kundera, another celebrated author, in 1979. East Germany and Romania, under Communist rule, took similar steps against critics, as did Chile under Augusto Pinochet, Greece under its military dictatorship, Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini. More recently, Nicaragua stripped more than 300 government critics of their citizenship.
Now comes a new effort to do so from President Trump’s administration. Last week, federal agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and a Somali immigrant, apparently as part of a federal investigation of her citizenship. The search should disturb all Americans, regardless of whether they agree with Ms. Omar’s political views.
The investigation of her is a chilling example of the federal government using its immense power to silence a critic. It is an affront to free speech, the rule of law and American ideals. It continues the Trump administration’s use of denaturalization as a weapon. In May and early June alone, the government began proceedings to take citizenship from 33 people, more than in any other entire year since at least 2008.
Ms. Omar is by any definition a political opponent of Mr. Trump’s. She is among the most progressive representatives in Congress, an original member of the so-called Squad, along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a frequent critic of the president. Mr. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly vilified her in public over the past seven years, often in ugly, racist ways that play into his broader fearmongering and lies about immigrants and Muslims. He has called her “garbage,” “scum,” “a disaster,” “a troublemaker” and “a terrible person.” He has mocked the head scarf she wears. He has said she should return to Somalia, which he has derided as having “nothing but crime, bedlam, filth.”
In an interview with The New York Times in January, he called for her deportation. “Ilhan Omar is a woman that should be immediately thrown out of Congress and sent back to her, her country, from where she’s always complaining about,” he said. When Tyler Pager, a Times reporter, followed up to ask if she should lose her citizenship, Mr. Trump replied, “Oh, absolutely.” Nine months later, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security entered her home and seized her phone, computers, notebooks and passport. They did so in the final weeks of Ms. Omar’s re-election campaign, violating a Justice Department standard against taking public action in an investigation of a candidate within 60 days of an election.
Mr. Trump’s allies have claimed, among other things, that Ms. Omar’s father misrepresented her age during her naturalization process 26 years ago by saying that she was 17 — and thus still a child — rather than 18. We do not pretend to know whether the allegations have merit. Yet as tempting as it may be to focus on them, they are not the main issue.
Sometimes, Mr. Trump makes claims about his perceived enemies that are simply false. Other times, his claims have some connection to reality. Repeatedly, though, he and his appointees use their law enforcement powers selectively and thus unjustly.
The list of critics whom they have targeted for investigation and prosecution includes John Bolton, E. Jean Carroll, James Comey, Lisa Cook, Cassidy Hutchinson, Gen. Mark Milley and Miles Taylor. At the same time, the Trump administration has failed to enforce the law against or has pardoned flagrant and violent criminals, so long as they are friendly to the president.
In the case of Ms. Omar, the administration has gone back more than a quarter-century to investigate a prominent critic. If her naturalization can be revisited, it suggests that no naturalized citizen is safe. It also indicates that the federal government can go searching for any decades-old problem to hound somebody who has criticized the White House. Those are the tactics of authoritarian societies.
They also evoke dark periods in American history. During the Red Scares of the early and mid-20th century, the federal government attempted to strip citizenship from labor leaders and others it accused of being radicals, often focusing on immigrants. At the time, officials like A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy used the cases to whip up anti-Communist fervor and justify their efforts to undermine American democracy.
Mr. Trump is following a similar playbook with Ms. Omar. The investigation of her should end immediately.
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