Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, has called for deporting Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., a U.S. citizen, back to her country of birth, Somalia.
“America would be a better place if @IlhanMN were deported back to Somalia,” Gill wrote Tuesday on X.
Gill, a freshman lawmaker representing Texas’s 26th Congressional District, was responding to a clip another X user shared on Tuesday of her recent interview with a reporter.
Thirty minutes later, in another post, Gill wrote that “we should have never let Ilhan Omar into our country.”
Omar came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1995 and became a naturalized citizen when she was 17 years old in 2000.
A spokesperson for Gill told The Hill, “Representative Omar’s conduct raises questions about to whom she is most loyal- the American people or illegal aliens from Somalia. Representative Gill simply stated that it is disgraceful for a sitting Congresswoman and US citizen to facilitate the invasion of our country by illegal alien Somalis.”
In the clip, Omar, the first Somali-American Congressmember, outlined what Somalians who are “undocumented or who their documentation might have lapsed” should do if they are questioned by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
“You are not obligated to answer their questions. Just state that your are advised by a lawyer not to answer questions,” Omar told the reporter. “Disclosure of your name, immigration status, and the mode of entry is not mandatory. Learn the laws and prepare yourself and refrain from disclosing information that you prefer them not to know.”
The Minnesota Democrat faced deportation calls last year after a mistranslated clip of her speech in Somali sparked heavy backlash on the right. At the time, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) moved to censure Omar and later told reporters that “I would love to expel her; I think she should be deported, I honestly do,” over the wrongly translated remarks.
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Tech billionaire and close President Trump ally Elon Musk also reacted to the Tuesday clip of Omar, writing Tuesday that “she is breaking the law. Literally. Outright.”
“It just shows you how much he lacks an understanding of what the laws of the country are,” Omar said Tuesday when asked about Musk’s post on “CNN News Central.”
The Minnesota progressive said that “it is important for people to exercise their Fifth Amendment rights to remain silent unless they feel confident that they have the legal protections that they need.”
“Nobody needs to put themselves at jeopardy by speaking to law enforcement if they do not have the advice of lawyers and we continue to tell people that,” she said on CNN.
The Hill has reached out to Omar’s office for comment.
