Congresswoman Omar says she will ‘not be silenced’ as Trump targets her at rally following raid

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Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar said she will “not be silenced” and called a search of her Washington home part of President Donald Trump’s “intimidation” campaign.

Democratic representative Omar, an outspoken critic of the president, said she was being targeted as one of the Republican’s “political enemies”.

It comes as Trump targeted the congresswoman during a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, last night. He said Somalia, where Omar was born, is “one of the worst countries ⁠anywhere on the planet”.

He said:

double quotation markShe comes from one of the worst countries ⁠anywhere on the planet. What a mess they have done – Somalia.

He urged supporters to vote Republican “if you want to stop Ohio from being plundered, ransacked and destroyed like Minnesota’s being destroyed”. In response, the crowd of Republican supporters chanted: “Deport, deport.”

US authorities conducted a predawn raid of Omar’s home in Washington, DC, on Monday as part of an ongoing investigation, the Justice Department said.

A person familiar with the investigation said it is ⁠related to alleged immigration fraud, and part of ⁠the probe concerns the Somali-born lawmaker’s immigration paperwork filled out ​by her late father when she was a child.

Omar wrote on social media that the US government is being weaponized to target a political enemy of the president.

“For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns,” she said. “This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.”

In a statement, US House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and other members of the party’s leadership in the chamber said the raid was “deeply disturbing and raises serious questions” about the weaponization of the federal government against Trump’s enemies.

In other developments:

  • A federal judge has ordered Donald Trump’s administration to temporarily halt the broadcast of taxpayer-funded television ads promoting the president ahead of the 3 November midterm elections. Effective as of 6.45pm ET on Sunday, US district judge Jennifer L Rochon of the southern district of New York issued a temporary restraining order aimed at the ads that is meant to stay in effect for at least 14 days.

  • The New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, compared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s recent shooting of a man in the Manhattan enclave of Marble Hill to a mass shooting scene – and called for an end to the agency’s operations in his city. Mamdani’s joined MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff for his first media interview since ICE agents shot and wounded Oscar Belgal, 28, during an enforcement operation while he was in his car with his five-year-old child also inside.

  • The Republican US senator Roger Marshall says he has finally paid off a bakery debt – after six years and repeated collection attempts reported by a Kansas business that had supplied a large order of treats for a 2020 election watch party. “We have absolutely no idea how this happened”, the Kansas senator wrote in a social media post containing a screenshot of the payment on a $678.75 invoice from Holly’s Sweet Treats as well as his $1,300 payment. “And we have repaid the bill … double.”

  • A businessman wanted for years in the US for allegedly paying bribes to top Venezuelan officials in exchange for lucrative state contracts in Venezuela has been taken into custody. Alvaro Pulido was indicted in Miami federal court in 2019 and again in 2021 as part of an investigation into his longtime business partner, Alex Saab, a one-time ally of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

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Key events

Eduardo Porter

There is a manic quality to Donald Trump’s desperate dash to do something, anything, ahead of November’s midterm elections to convince beleaguered Americans that he can make the pressures his policies have imposed on their livelihoods go away.

The US president offered to lower barriers against beef imports to limit surging meat prices, only to consider backtracking under pressure from the cow lobby. He offered to stop diesel exports, only to find oil companies were not interested. He weakened fuel efficiency standards, claiming this would trim the price of a new car (and forgetting to point out it will also raise spending on gas.) In early October he started mailing $500 checks to nearly a million people touting his healthcare “wins”. Oh, and he promised adult Americans a $5,000 check if Republicans maintain control of Congress. That, too, will go nowhere.

In the face of such setbacks, maybe Trump felt he had to demonstrate he still can get something done. Still, it is somewhat counterintuitive that the administration, in the shape of Vice-President JD Vance, decided to broadcast the one initiative it did manage to bring to fruition: ejecting more than 750,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance marketplaces, on grounds that they are not entitled to federal subsidies.

Trump could argue that the cuts fit within the administration’s promised commitment to restore fiscal discipline. But that part of the platform – which came as Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, promised to trim the budget deficit to 3% of US gross domestic product – was never more than a rhetorical feint.

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