“Do I have to be perfect before you’ll stop looking?” She said it without tears.
She had left the church that raised her, come out, and built a life. She still kept a folder of receipts, screenshots, and emails. It was a record of where she’d been, tucked in a drawer in case anyone asked.
No one had. She simply knew they might.
At a family wedding that spring, a cousin got a DUI in the parking lot. Her mother looked across the table at her. When a girl leaves, she becomes the explanation for everything that goes wrong even her cousins DUI.
She told me she wasn’t afraid of being wrong. She was afraid of being interpreted.
I heard someone who’d spent thirty years watching what her people did with anyone they decided was a threat. She knew the order. Suspicion first. Evidence later, from whatever was closest. The folder wasn’t paranoia. It was homework.
On Monday morning, October 12, federal agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home near Washington. The Justice Department says a judge authorized the warrant, as part of an ongoing criminal investigation. Reports say it involves her immigration paperwork. She hasn’t been charged. She denies wrongdoing, and her office calls the search an abuse of power.
I don’t know what’s in that warrant. Neither do you. Powerful people can be investigated.
But I didn’t come to Monday cold.
Vance said she committed immigration fraud and offered no evidence. Trump said she should be in jail and sent back to Somalia. Last month a border official confirmed a criminal probe.
In August, Minneapolis police searched the apartment her adult son shares with a roommate, after the roommate was arrested on a weapons charge. No one said her son did anything wrong. No one said she did. Within hours, people online were calling to deport her and her family.
A roommate’s arrest became a verdict on a mother. It had nothing to do with the facts.
She came here at twelve, as a refugee. She’s Muslim. She’s Somali. She’s been made the face of a community people keep calling criminal.
I’m not telling you what investigators will find. I’m telling you what I notice. The accusation came first. The case is only now showing up. I know that order. The woman in my office told me about it as did the long sordid history of women with power.
I’ve been to her district.
I went to her office and talked with her staff. I walked in a white, queer, cisgender woman nobody knew. They welcomed me into their space and told me about the district and what they were doing there.
Then I walked the neighborhoods she represents. Not overrun with crime and gangs. Neighborhoods. People living there. People getting help. She was helping them. Truly helping.
I’m not offering it as evidence about the investigation rather real life experience not just on-line comments.
Accountability is real. I don’t want to turn every investigation of a marginalized person into persecution by default.
But timing counts. So does the pattern. The case was argued in public long before anyone saw a charge, and the search came weeks before an election. I can hold both. I can’t make them one sentence.
She was elected by the people who live there. They know what she does for them better than a headline does. Representing your district is the job. It’s also democracy working. When that itself becomes suspect, I want to know who it’s protecting.
When the target is someone, whose identity is treated as a threat, I ask who’s next. Is it you is it me?
I keep thinking about the woman with the folder. She’s keeping it. Somewhere tonight a Muslim girl is learning what hers should hold. A queer kid in a pew is learning to read the room before they speak. Nobody must raid anything for that lesson to land. They only have to watch it happen to someone else and notice how many people shrug.
I don’t have a neat ending. I have a question I’d rather we answer now than learn the hard way. If your freedom to believe, to love, to be who you are only lasts until you become inconvenient to someone with power, was it ever freedom?
Sources
- PBS/AP: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-report-federal-agents-search-rep-ilhan-omars-home-as-part-of-a-criminal-investigation
- ABC News: ABC
- NBC News: NBC
- Axios: Axios
- Fox News (August search): Fox News