Rep. Ilhan Omar used a Sunday interview to forcefully condemn comments about migrants made by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, arguing that his language echoes historical moments of dehumanization.
According to Fox News, the Minnesota Democrat’s criticism came after CBS host Margaret Brennan asked her to respond to a social media post from Miller.
In the post, he wrote, “No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
Omar rejected the characterization outright.
She called Miller’s description “White supremacist rhetoric” and said it carried disturbing similarities to rhetoric used in some of the darkest chapters of history.
“It reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany,” Omar said.
She pointed to multiple examples from past waves of immigration, noting that groups now fully woven into American society were once targeted with the same type of language.
“There have been many immigrants who have tried to come to the United States who have turned back, you know, one of them being Jewish immigrants,” she said. “We know the way that people were described who were coming from Ireland, Irish immigrants. We know the way in which people were described back then, when there were Italian immigrants.”
Omar said today’s Somali Americans are no different.
“We’re, yes, of course, ethnically Somali, we are in this country as Americans, we are citizens, we are a productive part of this nation, and we will continue to be,” she said.
During the same interview, Omar also responded to statements President Donald Trump has made about Minnesota’s Somali community in connection with the state’s Feeding Our Future fraud case.
Federal prosecutors say more than 75 people have been charged as of November 2025, some of whom are part of the state’s large Somali diaspora, though the scheme’s ringleader is not.
Omar condemned Trump’s comments without hesitation.
“It’s disgusting. It’s completely disgusting. These are Americans that he is calling garbage,” she said. “And we feel like there is an unhealthy obsession that he has on the Somali community, and an unhealthy and creepy obsession that he has with me.”
She warned that such rhetoric carries consequences.
“It is also really important for us to remember that this kind of hateful rhetoric and this level of dehumanizing can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the president,” she said.
Omar was recently questioned on CNN about how the fraud scheme had grown so large. She pointed to the hurried rollout of pandemic-era aid programs.
“I think what happened, um, is that, you know, when you have these, kind of new programs that are, um, designed to help people, you’re oftentimes relying on third parties to be able to facilitate,” Omar said. She added that many COVID-era initiatives were set up “so quickly that a lot of the guardrails did not get created.”
