White supremacy 101: From Ilhan Omar to refugees to asylum seekers

Will any Republican in Congress challenge the Trump administration’s illegal and unconstitutional assault on a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives?

For the past 20 months, the silence of Republicans in Congress — and evangelical pastors in pulpits — on the wickedness of this administration’s assault on non-white immigrants and refugees has been staggering. No one has the courage to call the president and his evil henchman, Stephen Miller, what they are: Racists and white supremacists.

They’re also just meaner than a junkyard dog — which, dear evangelicals, is not a Christian virtue despite what Robert Jeffress says.

It takes someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene to speak truth to power. She wrote on X Oct. 14, after the Trump administration raided U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home in an effort to find evidence to revoke her citizenship:

Me and Ilhan Omar are far apart policy wise. I’m pro-life, she’s pro-abortion. I’m pro 2A, she’s pro-gun control. And on and on. But can someone tell me how pretending to get ready to deport Ilhan Omar is going to bring gas down under $2, make health insurance freaking affordable, make a family’s weekly grocery bill make sense, and stop sending our beloved military off to fight for another fucking foreign war??? People are so sick and tired of the bullshit. When you dumb mf’ers at the WH actually release the Epstein Files and lock up the pedophiles and rapists you all hang out with, then we will start paying attention.

Yes, this is an effort to strip a sworn enemy of the president of citizenship, which ought to scare the hell out of every reasonable American. Please do not say we’re overreacting or have Trump Derangement Syndrome. The evidence is clear. I’ll echo MTG: “People are so sick and tired of the bullshit.”

Sadly, we know about Omar’s case because she is a public figure. But the Trump administration has been doing the same thing to other people you never heard about. The cruelty is intensifying.

I’ve been collecting threads of this story for a couple of weeks now, and I want to lay this out for you.

It’s not ‘the worst of the worst’

Remember Trump and his allies originally said their deportation campaign was to root out “the worst of the worst” criminal immigrants. That never was true, despite what they claimed. It was and remains a campaign to rid the United States of as many non-white people as possible.

The plot is racist to the core.

On the audacious claim of denaturalizing U.S. citizens, the script is just like it was for the immigrant roundups and deportations: This is only happening to the worst of the worst. Which is why, of course, an elected U.S. representative who happens to be a critic of the president has been targeted.

“You’ve got to remember that Trump and Miller think all Democrats are evil — literally.”

You’ve got to remember that Trump and Miller think all Democrats are evil — literally.

Here’s a direct quote from an Oct. 5 news release from the U.S. Department of Justice:

The Department of Justice announced today that it has filed denaturalization actions in multiple U.S. district courts against 40 individuals accused of serious offenses, including acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special‑needs man.

Here’s some relevant data:

• From 1990 to 2017, the U.S. government averaged about 11 denaturalization cases per year.
• Under the Trump administration, the Department of Justice has significantly scaled up civil denaturalization enforcement, with 13 cases filed (eight won) in 2025 and 123 cases filed from Trump’s inauguration day to August 2026.
• Since Aug. 21, the DOJ filed an additional 40 denaturalization complaints in federal district courts.

The common refrain is the lie that the Biden administration was loose in its vetting and let the “wrong people” in. Funny how those “wrong people” all have dark skin. There’s about as much truth to this claim as the claim that under Biden America had “open borders.”

While we’re looking backward

If Trump and Miller are going to target Omar for review, let’s open the records on Melania Trump and Elon Musk. Omar has been a U.S. citizen longer than either of them.

Ilhan Omar entered the United States as a refugee in 1995 after her family fled civil war in Somalia and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya. She became a U.S. citizen in 2000 at the age of 17. Remember the “refugee” part of that, because we’ll come back to it in a moment.

Elon Musk became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2002. Born in South Africa, Musk held South African and Canadian citizenships before obtaining his U.S. citizenship. He did not enter as a refugee.

Melania Trump became a U.S. citizen on July 28, 2006. Originally from Slovenia, she moved to the U.S. on a visitor visa in 1996 and naturalized a year after marrying Donald Trump. She also did not enter as a refugee.

Please note: Ilhan Omar has been a naturalized United States citizen longer than either Melania Trump or Elon Musk. She spent four years in a refugee camp after fleeing civil war; they just waltzed right in.

And add this little twist: Barron Trump, born out of the marriage of Donald Trump and Melania Knauss, is a U.S. citizen because of birthright citizenship guaranteed in the Constitution. His father was U.S. born (although Donald Trump’s mother and paternal grandparents were born outside the U.S.) but his mother was not yet a U.S. citizen at the time of Barron’s birth.

Death of refugee resettlement

Now, in the second Trump administration, refugee resettlement in the U.S. is all but dead. The president and his team have set the refugee resettlement goal so low and made the process so cumbersome that only white South Africans — who are not being persecuted — may qualify.

Worthy refugees who have been waiting 10 or 15 years to come to the United States now have been told the door is closed. Refugees are the most highly vetted of all immigrants who come to the U.S.

Yet the vast majority these days are not white; they are brown and Black.

Connect the dots for yourself.

Death of asylum

Another thing the Trump administration has done is to all but shut the door on immigrants seeking asylum.

By law, asylum is granted to immigrants who show a well-founded fear of persecution based on at least one of five protected grounds: Race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, political opinion. And note this: By law, asylum seekers must already be physically present in the U.S. or seeking admission at a border or port of entry.

It never has been easy to win asylum in the U.S. I have personal experience walking with asylum seekers, and it always has been harrowing. But now it’s almost impossible.

In defiance of U.S. law, the Trump administration is now turning away asylum seekers at the border and not letting them enter to pursue their claims. The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has rubber stamped this.

And for those asylum seekers already in the U.S. but still in process with their claims — this can take 10 years — the Trump administration is finding new and creative ways to shut the door.

Here’s another data point: As recently as 2024, 43.5% of asylum decisions from an immigration judge were approvals — not a majority but still a large percentage. In 2026, from January to August, the approval rate for asylum in immigration court is down to 6.8%.

Why is this? Because the Trump administration has been firing immigration judges who grant asylum and replacing them with hardliners who do the president’s bidding. And the pressure on the judges who remain is explicit.

A recent report in the Chicago Tribune illustrates “the federal government’s increasingly heavy hand in the operations of immigration courts in Chicago and beyond.”

“In Chicago alone, nearly a dozen immigration judges have been fired.”

In Chicago alone, nearly a dozen immigration judges have been fired.

Jeremiah Johnson, vice president for the National Association of Immigration Judges, told the Tribune there is “pressure to handle the cases a certain way.”

“You know headquarters is now watching this,” he said. “It’s putting you on alert that you’re being watched by the White House.”

By the way, here’s a special category of interest of people being denied consideration for asylum in the United States: Persecuted Christians from around the world.

Do not let the irony escape you here. Evangelical Christians who feign concern for persecuted Christians in other countries eagerly support a president who this year has admitted zero — not one — persecuted Christian into our country.

Iranian Christians are losing their asylum cases. Chinese Christians are losing their asylum cases.

Death of due process

You’ve read for the last two years about how the Trump administration seeks to bypass legal requirements for due process in rounding up and deporting immigrants. Even when courts have ruled against the administration — which is the norm — the administration merely ignores the court and does what it wants.

Again, the check on this bad behavior is supposed to be Congress. But with Trump’s people in charge of both houses of Congress, he has no accountability. This is why it is essential for every Republican currently in Congress to be voted out in this year’s midterms. They are not fulfilling their constitutional duties.

This week, World Relief reported Trump’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued an interim final rule that “attacks the most-vetted category of immigrant’s access to due process. This rule would reduce the number of days a refugee would have to contest a challenge to their admissibility as a refugee from 30 to ten, changing longstanding precedent that allows a refugee a short period amount of time to gather supporting materials to assert their case.”

World Relief — an evangelical organization once involved in facilitating refugee resettlement — “decries this change and urges quick reversal and restoration of refugees’ full due process and ability to access full and fair consideration,” a news release said.

“Chipping away at refugees’ protections is one more attack on legal immigration, but it is also an affront to the due process promised every resident under the Constitution, not just to citizens,” said Myal Greene, president of World Relief. “While humans are fallible, and no earthly process is perfect, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has an incredibly strong track record in vetting. Any suggestion to the contrary implies a concerning unfamiliarity with the process or an insidious desire to undermine Constitutional rights.”

And just as with the stupidity of deporting so many immigrants who are workers on farms and in restaurants and in other essential roles, this new Trump rule will have negative economic consequences, said Aerlande Wontamo, senior vice president of U.S. programs at World Relief. “Far from being a burden on the American public, refugees more than repay the taxpayer resources used in their resettlement. In fact, after a refugee has lived in the U.S. for 20 years, the average adult refugee has contributed more than $21,000 in taxes over and above the combined cost of any governmental expenditures on their resettlement.”

Why is all this happening?

Given how cruel and counterproductive the MAGA obsession with immigrants and asylum seekers is, you’d be wise to wonder why all this is happening.

It’s happening because Trump and those closest to him are unrepentant racists and white supremacists. And it’s happening because Congress doesn’t have the spine to spot it. It’s also happening because the evangelical church in America has betrayed the gospel of Jesus Christ and bought into this cruelty.

Image this: What if the Biden administration had sent FBI agents to raid the home of Republican U.S. Rep. Carlos A. Giménez of Florida? Giménez was a child refugee who fled Cuba. In 1954 , he arrived in the U.S. with his family as a young boy shortly after the Communist takeover of the island.

Republicans would have lost their minds over this mistreatment of one of their own, who
“came the right way” to the U.S. Why the double standard?

That answer is easy too: Giménez looks white. And Florida Cuban refugees tend to vote Republican.

 

Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global.