1. United States
2. S.C.
3. Letter

On Monday, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the Washington DC area home of Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota congresswoman and a progressive Democrat, in the latest instance of Donald Trump’s effort to weaponize the national security state to harass, punish and embarrass his political opponents. The raid, which was approved by a judge after a reportedly extensive back-and-forth with federal security officials, was nominally carried out in connection with a spurious criminal investigation into Omar’s childhood immigration to the US. In reality, the episode is best understood as a bit of political theater. It was meant to embarrass Omar, a Black, immigrant Muslim woman in Congress whose ascent to national political prominence has become a symbol to the Maga right of the resentments and threats posed by pluralism. It was meant to cast an air of suspicion and criminality over the Democratic candidates who, like Omar, are facing the voters in a matter of weeks. The raid itself breaks the norms that have previously kept the government from visibly involving itself in investigations so close to and election. This was in an effort to avoid swaying public opinion in a way that could throw an election. But it seems obvious that intimindation, sowing fear, and interfering with a free and fair election were precisely the points that DHS wanted to hammer home. The raid was meant to make the president seem strong and appease the racist impulses of his base as his party faces down what is expected to be a trouncing in November’s midterm elections. It was meant to convey, both to this wavering base and to the nation at large, the Maga movement’s vision of law and citizenship, which the president views not as guarantors of dignity in a liberal democracy, but as tools to enforce racial hierarchy within a much narrower and more punitive white nationalist project. Let’s be clear: there is no evidence to support the allegation, which the raid on Monday was nominally meant to investigate, that Omar or her family committed immigration fraud when they came to the US as refugees in the late 1980s, when Omar was a child. But just because something isn’t true has never stopped the Maga movement from repeating it. Both the conspiracist cesspool of the far-right internet and its denizens who now have places of prominence in the Republican party have repeatedly and falsely claimed that Omar is not a legitimate citizen. It is time for Trump to stop terrorizing American citizens in a weak effort to distract from his many failures as the leader of a party that looks primed to take big losses in the upcoming mid-terms.