Ilhan Omar

(born 1982)

“Here in Minnesota, we don’t only welcome immigrants—we send them to Washington.”

Years in political office: 2017–present

Position: member of US House of Representatives from Minnesota, 2019–present; member of Minnesota House of Representatives, 2017–2019

Party affiliation: Democrat

Hometown: Mogadishu, Somalia

Top causes: gun safety laws, renters’ rights, and raising the minimum wage

Life Story

Ilhan Omar’s Yemeni mother died when the future US congressperson was two years old, leaving Omar’s father a single parent in charge of seven kids. When she was just eight years old, her family fled a civil war tearing apart their home country of Somalia to a refugee camp in Kenya. They lived in the makeshift community for four years before they were granted asylum in the United States. Eventually, they settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the city with more Somali residents than any other in the country. At the time, Minnesota had some of the worst rates of racial inequity in employment, education, and the criminal justice system in the US.

Omar’s dad drove taxis and worked at the post office to support the family. When Omar was seventeen, she became a US citizen, and a patriotic one at that. In later years, she was known to quote the Declaration of Independence to remind others of the greatness that the Founding Fathers’ egalitarian words promised. At nineteen she married Ahmed Hirsi in a faith-based ceremony, and the couple had two kids before they split. Omar married another man, got divorced, and then legally married Hirsi and had a third child with him before filing for divorce from him in 2019.

Amid the rampant Islamophobia that followed the 9/11 attacks, Omar began to wear a hijab as a statement that she would never be ashamed of her Muslim faith. She graduated from a state university and then worked in Minnesota public school nutrition programs, on political campaigns, and as a city council policy aide. Omar scored a seat in the Minnesota state legislature in 2016, beating an incumbent who had spent forty-four years in office.

Also in 2016, Donald Trump made a stop on his first presidential campaign at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport. The election was two days away, and at the podium he said members of the local Somali population were “spreading their extremist views all over our country.” Trump won the presidency, and the next year, members of an anti-Muslim militia group bombed a Bloomington, Minnesota, mosque. Many felt his racially biased speech had emboldened the perpetrators, and the Washington Post found that across the country, counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent rise in hate crimes.

Two years after that speech, Omar was elected to the US Congress, becoming, alongside Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib (page 172), one of the first two Muslim women to do so. Omar took over the seat formerly held by Keith Ellison, the first Muslim ever elected to the House of Representatives. Six candidates had run for Minnesota’s most firmly Democratic district, but Omar beat the closest competitor by 18 percent.

Omar’s heroes are women of color who dare to make themselves known. She uses Beyoncé gifs to congratulate colleagues, as she did when Ayanna Pressley became the first Black woman elected to represent Massachusetts in the House of Representatives. A pencil drawing of Shirley Chisholm (page 74) hangs in the waiting room of Omar’s Capitol Hill office.

What’s on Her Agenda

Though relatively new to office, Omar has taken on a high profile in Congress. In her first few months as a representative, she sponsored a bill that would bar schools from shaming kids whose families are late on their school lunch payment, and another resolution denouncing Sharia law in Brunei that would punish by death offenses like blasphemy, theft, and gay sex. She helped author a piece of legislation to provide childcare to the federal employees affected by Trump’s thirty-five-day government shutdown in early 2019.

Like Ellison before her—and Palestinian Tlaib, to a lesser degree—Omar has found herself at the center of the debate over Israel’s actions in the Middle East. She believes that the considerable monetary aid the United States gives to Israel is used to violate the human rights of Palestinians. That view is contested by those who hold that military force is the only way Israel can survive as a Jewish homeland, and some point out that critics of Israel often overlook the actions of other US allies with worse human-rights violations.

Omar has publicly supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. This movement aims to protest Israeli West Bank settlements, which have displaced many non-Israeli individuals, by withdrawing support for the country’s products and businesses.

In response to criticism of that support, she once tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” implying that US politicians were influenced by money from pro-Israel lobby groups. But critics pointed out that her remarks echoed a long history of anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Omar has apologized for some of her remarks on the matter, as in the case of that since-deleted tweet. She acknowledged that she had unintentionally played into harmful stereotypes of Jewish greed by responding, “Anti-Semitism is real, and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.”

But she insists that people must acknowledge a difference between bigotry directed toward Jewish people and criticism of the State of Israel, its US lobbyists, and the aid packages the US sends its way. “I am told everyday that I am anti-American if I am not pro-Israel,” she once tweeted. “I find that to be problematic and I am not alone.” Progressives including Elizabeth Warren (page 180) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (page 140) have agreed with Omar on these views, but her remarks have alienated more conservative Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi (page 154), as well as Republicans like Representative Lee Zeldin and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

In 2019 Trump told the four first-year members of Congress known as the Squad—Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib, all of them women of color—to “go back” to the countries they came from. In response, Omar quoted Maya Angelou’s famous poem “And Still I Rise,” whose lines speak of triumphing over those who would diminish the author’s strength.

At her 2019 swearing-in ceremony on the Quran, Omar wore an orange-and-red-striped hijab. Wearing the garment was made possible by a very recent revision (for which Omar had pushed) of a 181-year House floor ban on headwear. Later, a pastor complained that “the floor of Congress is now going to look like an Islamic republic.”

Omar responded swiftly: “Well sir, the floor of Congress is going to look like America. . . . And you’re gonna have to just deal.”

Awesome Achievements

• Omar was appointed to the House Committee on Education and Labor, as well as the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in her first year in office.
• She once caught thirteen Mississippi River fish to win the Minnesota governor’s fishing season opening day contest, besting her political peers. She kept the achievement on her Twitter bio for years.
• She is the first Somali member of the US Congress, as well as its first representative born in an African country.

Quotables

“I always find conflicts to be the best sources for organizing.”

“I know what it means to be American, and no one will ever tell me otherwise.”

“We should never look at anyone and say, ‘You can lead tomorrow.’ Everyone needs to understand the urgency of leading today.”