The White House seems ready for Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., to leave the US and go back to Somalia, where she was born.
On Monday, the White House shared on X an image of President Donald Trump waving goodbye through a McDonald’s drive-thru window in 2024 in response to a video of Omar saying she wasn’t concerned about being deported.
“I have no worry, I don’t know how they’d take away my citizenship and like deport me,” Omar said in the clip the White House responded to, which originally was made on “The Dean Obeidallah Show” in October. “But I don’t even know like why that’s such a scary threat. Like I’m not the 8-year-old who escaped war anymore. I’m grown, my kids are grown. Like I could go live wherever I want.”
Omar’s office and the White House did not immediately respond to request for comment from Fox News Digital.
The image of Trump the White House shared was from October 2024 during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania where he worked at a McDonald’s fry station.
Omar’s family evacuated Somalia to head to a refugee camp in Kenya during the Somalian Civil War in 1991. The US eventually granted her family asylum, and they came to Arlington, Virginia, in 1995 before heading to Minneapolis in 1997. Omar became a US citizen in 2000.
Trump recently has suggested that Omar should return to Somalia, and said in a post on Truth Social Nov. 1 that “She should go back!” The post accompanied a video of Omar speaking Somali.
Likewise, Trump also told reporters in September that Somalia wasn’t interested in Omar returning.
“You know, I met the head of Somalia, did you know that?” Trump said. “And I suggested that maybe he’d like to take her back. He said, ‘I don’t want her.’”
In response, Omar said that the story was fabricated and called the president’s credibility into question.
“From denying Somalia had a president to making up a story, President Trump is a lying buffoon,” Omar said. “No one should take this embarrassing fool seriously.”
Trump has sparred with Omar dating back to his first administration. For example, he blasted Omar and a few other progressive lawmakers known as “The Squad,” and said that they should all return to their “broken and crime infested” countries.
As a result, Omar said in a social media post in 2019 that Trump was “stoking white nationalism bc you are angry that people like us are serving in Congress and fighting against your hate-filled agenda.”
Omar was elected to the US House of Representatives in 2018, after serving for two years in Minnesota’s House of Representatives. She became the first Somali–American woman and one of the first Muslim women to be elected to Congress.
