On Monday, October 12, Trump’s DHS/ICE-Gestapo carried out a pre-dawn raid of Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home. They seized her passport, phone, computers, and notebooks, in a blatantly political attack on an opposition party politician just weeks before the scheduled midterm elections. According to Reuters, investigators are examining alleged false statements in decades-old immigration and naturalization paperwork when she was 12 (!) years old. One source identified stripping Omar’s citizenship and deporting her as a potential aim. On Friday, Omar’s lawyers demanded that seized property be returned, alleging DHS ignored court-imposed restrictions on their search. 

Yes, a sitting member of the House of Representatives is being actively targeted and investigated by the full-on fascist executive. If it were just about Omar alone, it would still be outrageous—including that by tradition, the Justice Department does not bring charges against candidates during the last 60 days before an election, for fear of unduly influencing that election.

But it is not just Omar. There are horrific implications for millions of naturalized citizens, most of whom have been driven to this country from homelands destroyed and/or distorted by imperialism. And there are implications for everyone who might disagree with one or another policy of this administration—step too far out of line, and the state will come up with something to charge you with.

Because of all this, the prosecution and persecution of Ilhan Omar must be firmly opposed.

Trump Says Somalian Immigrants “Come From Hell.” The Question Is, Who Made It A “Hell”? 

Omar has been the target of Trump’s racist, white supremacist ire for the better part of a decade, and he has repeatedly incited his followers at his Nuremberg-style rallies to chant “send her back!”. In a December 2025 cabinet meeting, Trump called Omar and Somali immigrants “garbage” and said, “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country.”¹

This totally turns reality upside down. For more than 100 years, the people in Somalia have suffered bitterly from the legacies of European colonialism, the operations of capitalist-imperialism and the constant clan warfare between rival warlords. Somalia's central government collapsed in the early 1990s, and the attempt by the U.S. to impose its domination by invasion failed there in 1993, after the famous "Black Hawk Down" rout of U.S. forces in Mogadishu.² In the two and a half decades since 9/11, Somalis have also lived in the shadow of U.S. drone strikes. For the “crime” of fleeing this hell that old-style colonialism and U.S.-domination/capitalism-imperialism has wreaked on their country, Somali people living here are being punished—demonized, scapegoated, and criminalized by the fascist-in-chief. Any system which does this to people simply seeking to live a dignified life is one that does not deserve to exist. 

Trump Says Some Citizens Can NOT Invoke Their Rights

At a rally just hours after the raid, Trump mocked Omar for invoking her constitutional rights. Trump’s NAZI-like implication is clear: certain types of people cannot invoke their rights, because they do not have any we are bound to respect; and further, certain types of people can be stripped of their citizenship and removed from the country, on our say so. And there is the dimension that: if they can do this to a Democratic Party politician who has operated within the bounds of “normal” political operations for a decade, what do you think they will do to the masses of naturalized citizens, immigrants, and all others of the “wrong” type? 

This persecution is an expression of Trump/MAGA’s intense hatred of the fact that a Black, Somali-born Muslim woman holds political office in what they insist should be a white, Christian country. As Revolution wrote incisively back in the first Trump regime, Trump treats Omar (and other women of color in the Democratic Party) “as a stand-in, an avatar, for whole sections of people who they seek to dehumanize, terrorize, and ‘cleanse’ from America. The chant ‘send her back’ is a genocidal rallying cry, a license to terrorize and remove anyone who is not white, not American-born, not Christian, not faithful to the fascist-in-chief.”³

Rep. Omar posted on X, “For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.”

A System In Deep Crisis

This was blatant political intimidation. It also represents a deliberate explosion of the “cohering norms” that the rulers of this country have operated within since the end of the Civil War in the 1860s.⁴ It has been the case in this country that opposition politicians can contest power and criticize the executive without being subjected to retaliatory prosecution and threatened with exile. Under the normal functioning of the state in a bourgeois (capitalist) system, there is a broader participation in the exercise of state power within the ruling capitalist class and its political representatives than simply one section of this class enforcing its rule against—and to the exclusion of—other sections. This is associated closely with the “peaceful transfer of power” from one section of the ruling class to another. 

With its attempts to consolidate fascism—a different, qualitatively more repressive and reactionary form of rule of this capitalist system—the Trump fascist regime, and the Republican Party as a whole, are tearing these norms apart and seeking to install new norms. 

Bob Avakian (BA) scientifically analyzed the situation in the U.S. in 2021 this way: 

As is becoming more clear every day, there are deep, and continually deepening, divisions not only in this country overall but among the ruling powers of this system…. one part of those ruling powers, represented by the Republican Party, no longer believes in or feels bound by what have been the “cohering norms” of “democratic” capitalist rule in this country. This is leading, and will increasingly lead, to further, deepening divisions and bitter clashes throughout society, as well as “at the top.” All the ruling institutions of this system will be increasingly affected by this. The polarization will continue to sharpen, with forces grouped around and led by the Republican Party becoming even more aggressive in insisting on imposing, including by violent means, their vision of what “makes America great,” with all the very real horrors, on top of horrors, that this involves.

Through the development of events in the five years since then, including the terror and revenge of Trump 2.0, these divisions have continued to deepen. When the conflicts “at the top” of society sharpen in this way, the possibility is posed of actually breaking the hold of this system over masses of peoples thinking. When the old way that held things together starts to break down… when there are attacks on rights and “normal ways of doing things” that people once took for granted… when people are forced to confront that what is coming into being is something they do NOT want to live with… then they can become more open to seeking ways out, including revolutionary ways out.

This is a big part of what makes this a rare time when revolution is more possible than it has been in generations. This is what must be seized, if there is to be any hope of a liberating future for humanity.

The Democratic Party Will NOT Fight Fascism The Way It Needs To Be Fought

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has held back from full-throatedly sounding the alarm against the outrageous attacks on Ilhan Omar. Despite some words of condemnation from Democratic Party leaders and organizations that are tied to them, this raid and its ominous implication have so far not been treated with the seriousness it deserves. Obsessively focused on a myopic “affordability” agenda that ignores or downplays the fascism of Trump/MAGA, the Democrats continue to try to confine political struggle to voting and a narrow band of “acceptable” actions and discourse. 

In regard to the upcoming midterms, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the fascists will not carry out all kinds of fuckery (see here and here)—including this kind of repression and far worse—especially in the face of a vote that goes against them. To be clear, these fascist attacks must not be allowed to go down and they cannot be effectively fought by relying on the rules and institutions that the fascists themselves are actively dismantling and gutting. 

Forging a Way Forward 

On a deeper level: In order to decisively defeat this fascism, with its deep roots in this country’s history of slavery and genocide, white supremacy and patriarchal oppression, it will be necessary to break the allegiance of masses of people from this system of capitalism-imperialism, and lead a revolution for a whole new way to live, a fundamentally different system. As the conflicts and divisions between the different sections of the rulers continue to deepen and sharpen, masses of people need to respond NOT by falling in line behind one or another ruling faction, but by taking advantage of these divisions to overthrow the system that all of these capitalist oppressors enforce. 

This will not happen spontaneously. It requires the scientific understanding and leadership concentrated in the New Communism brought forward by Bob Avakian (BA). BA has written extensively on this fascism—on what it represents, how it needs to be fought, and what must replace it. Go here, here or here for more on this.

To quote again from Bob Avakian (BA), in his landmark work for this time, HUMANITY ON THE BRINK, 

While the resistance against the fascist regime must continue, the advocates of the new communism, while continuing to be actively involved in this resistance, must be firmly oriented and prepared to carry out ongoing work for revolution—theoretical, political, practical and organizational work—even as this will need to be done under the conditions that will likely be qualitatively more repressive and difficult.