Squad's Ilhan Omar snaps at reporter in explicit F-bomb rant after simple immigration question

Progressive 'Squad' member Ilhan Omar did not hold back on a reporter when asked a simple question about Democrats pushing back on Donald Trump 's immigration policies.
Omar was confronted about the many Democrats, including Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who have taken trips to El Salvador to visit a suspected MS-13 gangster who was deported by Trump.
'Do you think more of your Democratic colleagues should be traveling to El Salvador to advocate on behalf of [Kilmar] Abrego Garcia?' Daily Caller News Foundation journalist Myles Morell asked the Minnesota Democrat.
Morell filmed his question as Omar, 42, approached the Capitol from the sidewalk.
The congresswoman, who is originally from Somalia, has been an outspoken advocate for migrants since being in Congress.
After recognizing that the journalist was filming, the congresswoman quickly adverted her gaze and retorted: 'I think you should f*** off.'
In recent weeks Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and four House Democrats visited El Salvador to advocate for the migrant who was deported from the U.S.
Democrats have expressed their distaste for the White House 's refusal to honor court orders demanding the return of Abrego Garcia, who was deported as a result of an 'administrative error,' the administration has said.
Bewildered with the answer, the reporter asked the progressive to clarify.
'I'm sorry, what, congresswoman?' Morell shot back.
'You should f*** off,' Omar said again. 'Who?' Morell asked again before Omar again said, 'You.'
'Why me?' Morell asked as the congresswoman walked off.
The back and forth ended with Omar walking off and one of her staffers telling Morell that the 'Squad' member is not taking questions.
The abrasive interaction quickly blew up on X as users weighed in on the contentious interaction.
'So disgraceful coming from a congresswoman that we pay her salary,' one user wrote.
Other's called the tirade an 'embarrassment,' while some noted how Republicans like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace have had similar curse-laden blow ups.
'I said what I said,' Omar responded to the Daily Caller's video. 'You and all your miserable trolls can f*** off.'
Abrego Garcia was deported due to law enforcement reports linking him to the Salvadoran gang MS-13.
President Trump has commented at length about he migrant and his legal case, going so far as to hold up images of Abrego Garcia's tattoos in the Oval Office, sure fire proof that the migrant was in the gang, the Republican argues.
Rep. Robert Garcia and Maxwell Frost take part in a press conference to advocate for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man deported from the U.S. without due process by the Trump administration as an alleged MS-13 gang member and sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a maximum-security prison, in San Salvador, El Salvador, April 21, 2025
Abrego Garcia's American wife, Jennifer Vasquez, alleged that her husband violently beat her, according to court documents obtained by Daily Mail last month.
Additional legal filings have indicated that Abrego Garcia hung out with confirmed MS-13 members.
A report out of Tennessee found that the migrant was busted by police for driving a car full of migrants across the country, potentially implicating him in a human smuggling operation.
Though he was apprehended, Abrego Garcia was allowed to walk free despite the suspicious incident.
Trump has said he could return the man but that he does not want to.

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Florida Republicans racially gerrymandered two state senate districts, court hears

Republicans in Florida racially gerrymandered two key state senate districts to disenfranchise Black voters and skew results in the Tampa Bay area, a panel of judges has heard. In one district, they took a small chunk of St Petersburg heavy with minority voters and added it to an area of Tampa in a different county, and across a 10-mile waterway, leaving the remainder of its electorate 'artificially white', the court was told. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, representing voters at a four-day trial in Tampa last week, said the state's defense that the waters of Tampa Bay made the new district contiguous was ridiculous, pointing out in the lawsuit that 'manatees don't vote'. 'These are cities on opposite sides of the bay and there's no way to go directly between them,' Caroline McNamara, an ACLU staff attorney, said. 'You either have to go across 10 miles of open ocean at the mouth of Tampa Bay, or you have to cut through other districts in the area through the north end.' The case has direct parallels in previous moves by Republican officials in Florida to manipulate voting districts to their advantage by undercutting Black voting power. Ron DeSantis, the hard right governor, was behind a move in 2022 to redraw congressional maps to secure four additional seats, a plan that resulted in white Republicans winning all four races in northern Florida while cutting the number of districts in which Black voters had a chance to elect a candidate of their choice from four to two. 'It was a lynching,' Brenda Holt, a Black commissioner in Gadsden county, told the Guardian at the time. In the Tampa Bay case, the three judges will give their ruling at a later date on whether the Republican-held senate's 2022 redistricting process was unconstitutional. A decision in favor of the plaintiffs would require a redrawing of Florida's 16th and 18th senate districts, subject to appeal. Currently, the state senator for the split district is Darryl Rouson, a Democrat, who maintains offices in both St Petersburg and Tampa, and must drive through the middle of another district to get from one to the other. 'It's like all of the voters have half a senator, half of the time. It's crazy,' McNamara said. 'Every year there's big celebrations on Martin Luther King Day in January, and he has to alternate years whether he's in St Petersburg or Tampa, because he can't do both.' One of the three plaintiffs, Keto Nord Hodges, a Black Hillsborough county voter, told the court he felt underrepresented. 'We don't really see Senator Rouson in Tampa. I can't remember the last time I saw him,' he said. While the Tampa side of the district Rouson represents was always reliably Democratic, and he secured almost twice the number of votes than his Republican opponent in the 2022 election, the removal of Black voters from St Petersburg diluted their voting power in the newly created district there, the lawsuit states. Republican Nick DiCeglie, who is white, coasted to victory over his Democratic challenger Eunic Ortiz, who is Hispanic and openly gay, in 2022 by more than 30,000 votes in one of the country's most diverse cities. Effectively, the ACLU argued, the maps represent racial gerrymandering because they pack about half of the region's Black population into a single one of the its five senate districts. 'This trial laid bare what many communities have long felt, that Florida's mapmakers chose politics over fairness,' Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement. 'When lawmakers choose to prioritize outdated assumptions about where Black voters 'belong' over meaningful representation, it reinforces structural inequities. We're here to ensure that voters in Tampa and St Petersburg are no longer crammed into one district in a way that diminishes the value of their votes.' McNamara dismissed the arguments of lawyers for Cord Byrd, the Florida secretary of state, and Ben Albritton, the Florida senate president, that the maps complied with state law requiring any redistricting process to ensure minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. 'They just thought this is a box to check they probably wanted to do what they needed to do but not more,' she said. 'We say that they didn't even do what they needed to do, like they just didn't take it seriously, they were dismissive throughout the process.' The Florida department of state did not respond to the Guardian's requests for comment. McNamara said that although DeSantis had no direct role in drawing the senate maps, the process took place against the governor's backdrop of 'disenfranchisement and attacks on communities of color'. She said: 'You could say this is just a technical thing, or it's about numbers, and sure, who cares if it crosses water? 'But the fact they're like, 'who cares if these two completely far-flung areas are joined together without any real connection, and the only basis for doing it is the color of the people's skin?' Well, that's exactly the issue that the 14th amendment of the constitution has a problem with.'

The Guardian

2 hours ago

• The Guardian

‘Our era of violent populism': the US has entered a new phase of political violence

It has been a grim couple of weeks in the US, as multiple acts of politically motivated violence have dominated headlines and sparked fears that a worrying new normal has taken hold in America. Last Saturday, a man disguised as a police officer attacked two Democratic legislators at their homes in Minnesota, killing a state representative and her husband, and wounding another lawmaker and his wife. The alleged murderer was planning further attacks, police said, on local politicians and abortion rights advocates. The same day, during national 'No Kings' demonstrations against the Trump administration, there was a spate of other violence or near-violence across the US. After a man with a rifle allegedly charged at protesters in Utah, an armed 'safety volunteer' associated with the protest fired at the man, wounding him and killing a bystander. When protesters in California surrounded a car, the driver sped over a protester's leg. And a man was arrested in Arizona after brandishing a handgun at protesters. Later in the week, a Jewish lawmaker in Ohio reported that he was 'run off the road' by a man who waved a Palestinian flag at him. Police in New York also said they were investigating anti-Muslim threats to the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. The political temperature is dangerously high – and shows few signs of cooling. 'We are in a historically high period of American political violence,' Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told the Guardian. 'I call it our 'era of violent populism'. It's been about 50 years since we've seen something like this. And the situation is getting worse.' He said the US is in a years-long stretch of political violence that started around the time of Donald Trump's first election, with perpetrators coming from both the right and the left. In 2017, the first year of Trump's first presidency, a leftwing activist opened fire on a group of Republican politicians and lobbyists playing baseball, wounding four people. In 2021, pro-Trump rioters attacked the US Capitol. In 2022, a conspiracy theorist attacked then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer, and a man angry about the US supreme court's rightward drift tried to assassinate justice Brett Kavanaugh. Trump survived two assassination attempts in 2024; the Pennsylvania gunman's bullet missed Trump's face by a few centimeters. The Israel-Gaza war has contributed to the tension. Last month a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC; the alleged perpetrator, an American-born leftwing radical, described the killings as an act of solidarity with Palestinians. A couple weeks later a man in Colorado attacked a group of pro-Israel demonstrators with molotov cocktails. Pape directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, which studies terrorism and conflict. He noted in a recent piece in the New York Times that his research has found rising support among both left- and right-leaning Americans for the 'use of force' to achieve political means. The May survey was 'the most worrisome yet', he wrote. 'About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump's agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions.' Americans are not only polarized, but forming into distinct and visible 'mobilized blocs', Pape says. He also notes that acts of political violence seem to be becoming 'increasingly premeditated'. Quantifying political violence or 'domestic terrorism' can be difficult, Pape said, because the FBI does not track it in a consistent manner. The best proxy, he said, is often prosecuted threats against members of Congress. Those 'have gone up dramatically, especially since the first year of Trump's first term', he said, adding that the threats have been 'essentially 50-50' against Democratic and Republican lawmakers. The US Capitol police, which protects Congress, reported in April that the number of threat assessment cases it has investigated 'has climbed for the second year in a row'. While both sides have committed violence, Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, thinks that Republican political leaders carry more culpability for the violent climate. 'We haven't seen the mainstream political left embrace political violence in the same way,' he said. He noted that while Luigi Mangione, the man who allegedly murdered a healthcare insurance executive last year, could be considered leftwing, he was 'more of an anti-system extremist' who also hated the Democratic party. In contrast, 'when you look at the rhetoric and language being used in neo-Nazi mass shooter manifestos, it's almost identical to Stephen Miller posts', he added, referring to the White House aide. Quantifying violence is also tricky because it can be difficult to determine ideological motives or causal relations. People died during the 2020 George Floyd protests and riots, but it is not clear to what extent all of the deaths were directly related to the unrest. In 2023, a transgender shooter attacked a Christian private school in Tennessee, killing three children and three adults; while the attacker had railed against 'little crackers' with 'white privileges', investigators concluded that the attack was most motivated by a desire for notoriety. This April, someone set the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro's mansion on fire while he and his family, who were unharmed, slept inside. Although Shapiro is Jewish and the alleged perpetrator made remarks condemning Israel, the suspect's family members have said that he has a long history of mental health problems. In other cases, acts of violence are ideological but don't fall on to conventional political lines. Earlier this year, a man bombed a fertility clinic in California; the suspect was an anti-natalist – or self-described 'pro-mortalist' – who was philosophically opposed to human reproduction. Pape believes that the current wave of violence and tumult is only partly a reaction to Trump's polarizing politics. 'He's as much a symptom as a cause,' he said. The more important factor is 'a period of high social change … as the US moves from a white-majority country to a white-minority country. And that's been going drip, drip, drip since the early 1970s, but around 10 years ago we started to go through the transition generation', Pape said. The closest analogue is probably the US in the 1960s and 1970s, when the civil rights movement, the hippy counterculture, the Vietnam war, and Black and Latino nationalism were accompanied by a wave of political assassinations and other violence as white supremacist groups and others harassed and killed civil rights leaders. There was also a wave of leftwing violence. Domestic terror groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground attacked judges, police officers and government offices. In 1972, according to Bryan Burrough's 2015 book Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, there were over 1,900 domestic bombings in the US, though most were not fatal. Later, the 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of the anti-government militia movement, which culminated in Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma federal building. That bombing killed 168 people, and is the most deadly domestic terror attack in US history. Lewis thinks that violent rhetoric is now even more normalized – that there is increasing tolerance of the idea that 'political violence, targeted hate, harassment, is OK if it's your in-group … against the 'other side''. American political leaders need to condemn political violence, Pape said, ideally in a bipartisan way and in forms that show prominent Democratic and Republican figures physically side-by-side: 'The absolute number one thing that should happen … is that president Trump and governor Newsom do a joint video condemning political violence.' After Melissa Hortman, the Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was killed last weekend, Mike Lee, a Utah senator, published social media posts making light of her death and insinuating it was the fault of the state's Democratic governor, Tim Walz. Lee later deleted the posts, but has not apologized. Walter Hudson, a Republican state representative in Minnesota who was acquainted with Hortman, said he has been thinking about the relationship between political rhetoric and violence since Hortman's death. 'I think it's fair to say that nobody on either side of the aisle, no matter the language they've used, would have ever intended or imagined that something they said was going to prompt somebody to go and commit a vicious and heartless act like the one we saw over the weekend,' he said. He acknowledged that rhetoric can be a factor in violence, however. 'I don't know how we unwind this,' he said. 'The optimistic side of me hopes that it's going to translate into a different approach.'

Leader Live

4 hours ago

• Leader Live

Plaid to PM: 'Don't follow Trump into Middle East conflict'

Rhun ap Iorwerth, MS for Ynys Môn, and Liz Saville Roberts, MP for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, welcomed Prime Minister Keir Starmer's calls for diplomacy and de-escalation, but voiced concerns that he had fallen short of roundly condemning President Trump's authorisation of US strikes against Iran overnight. The Plaid Cymru politicians said that the pursuit of peace should take priority over any UK loyalty to the US and warned against repeating history where the UK entered a regional conflict in the Middle East as 'America's puppet.' In a joint statement, Mr ap Iorwerth and Ms Saville Roberts said: 'President Trump's decision to launch US strikes against Iran is potentially catastrophic for an already destabilised region. 'Whilst Prime Minister Keir Starmer's calls for diplomacy and de-escalation are to be welcomed, it is concerning that he has fallen short of roundly condemning President Trump's actions. 'The pursuit of peace should take priority over any UK loyalty to the US. We all remember the disastrous consequences of being dragged into a regional conflict in the Middle East as America's puppet. 'It is essential therefore that Parliament has the opportunity to veto any UK military involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict should Keir Starmer yield to any pressure from President Trump and propose some form of intervention. 'In the same way the US Democrats are divided on the issue, Keir Starmer may well face pressure from Labour hawks to follow President Trump's lead. 'Air strikes were launched against Syria in 2018 without granting Parliament an opportunity to vote on military action. At the time Plaid Cymru accused then-Prime Minister Theresa May of showing complete disregard towards democracy. 'We stand firmly by that view and reiterate our calls for restraint before more innocent civilian lives are lost.' The US strike on Iran has fuelled fears that Israel's war with Tehran could escalate to a wider regional conflict. World leaders have reacted with calls for diplomacy and words of caution. US President Donald Trump had said on Thursday that he would decide within two weeks whether to get involved. In the end, it took just days, and Washington inserted itself into Israel's campaign with its early attack early on Sunday, reports the Press Association (PA).