Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said on Sunday that the dehumanizing language used against immigrants by noted racist and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller is similar to how Nazis spoke of Jewish people.
Miller, who was the architect behind the Trump administration’s immigration policies, used such language last month in response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed urging Americans to refrain from demonizing all Afghan refugees, after one allegedly shot two National Guard members in Washington, D.C.
“This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies,” Miller said on X. “No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
That post wasn’t the first time Miller made such comments dehumanizing nonwhite immigrants. The adviser regularly echoes the “great replacement theory,” a conspiracy promoting the racist idea that nonwhite immigrants are “invading” the country to “replace” the country’s white population.
“When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, it reminds of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany,” Omar, a Somali American lawmaker who came to the U.S. as a refugee, told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“As we know, there’ve been many immigrants who’ve tried to come to the United States [that] we’ve turned back, one of them being Jewish immigrants,” she continued, pointing out the vitriol that the U.S had toward Irish and Italian immigrants in the past.
Omar’s remarks come as federal immigration authorities launch an operation in Minnesota that’s similar to the raids already being carried out in Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and more. The operation targets the state’s more than 84,000 residents of Somali descent, 95% of whom are U.S. citizens.
“We’re yes of course ethnically Somali. We are in this country as Americans,” the Minnesota Democrat said. “We are citizens, we are productive, [we are] part of this nation and we will continue to be.”
Without directly addressing Omar, Miller posted on X saying, without evidence, that the “entire Somali refugee program is predicated on a lie.” Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, had a more direct response.