Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks during a press conference on the first 100 days of President Trump's second term at the U.S. Capitol April 29, 2025Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP
During a Sunday interview on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said that Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller’s late November comments about “migrants and their descendants” reminded her of how Nazis talked about Jewish people in Germany.
Host Margaret Brennan brought up Miller’s Thanksgiving day post on X, when the top White House adviser and architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda bemoaned what he called the “great lie of mass migration.”
“You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies,” Miller commented over a Wall Street Journal editorial on avoiding collective punishment following reporting that the man alleged to have shot two National Guard troops is an Afghan national. “No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” he continued.
Omar, a refugee from Somalia, said of the comments: “When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremist rhetoric, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany.”
The representative’s statement comes as Trump and Miller’s immigration enforcement apparatus has descended on Minnesota’s Twin Cities and aimed its campaign specifically at immigrants from Somalia, leading some US citizens to carry their passports out of fear.
In a speech that spurred widespread outrage this week, Trump repeatedly referred to people from Somalia as “garbage.”
At the end of a cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump said Somalia “stinks” and that immigrants from the country “come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch.” “We don’t want them in our country,” he said multiple times.
“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. He then singled out Rep. Omar: “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”
In a New York Times guest essay following Trump’s comments, Omar defended her community, writing, “The president knows he is failing, and so he is reverting to what he knows best: trying to divert attention by stoking bigotry.”
As for Miller, his anti-immigrant comments are anything but new.
