Tommy Tuberville Racist Immigration Alabama

Tommy Tuberville Says Rep. Ilhan Omar, a U.S. Citizen for 26 Years, Should Be Deported: 'Send Her Back Where She Came From.'

On Newsmax, the Alabama senator running for governor said Omar 'wants the president to be dead' and should be sent home. Newsmax's own story noted that Tuberville pointed to no statement in which Omar said any such thing. Omar fled Somalia's civil war as a child and became a citizen in 2000; a citizen can't be deported unless a court first strips her citizenship.

MAGA Report Cards · Sep 16, 2026

Tommy Tuberville Says Rep. Ilhan Omar, a U.S. Citizen for 26 Years, Should Be Deported: 'Send Her Back Where She Came From.'

Tommy Tuberville is a U.S. senator from Alabama, and he's running for governor. On Monday, September 14, he went on Newsmax and said a sitting member of Congress, and an American citizen, should be deported.

The target was Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat. Here's what he said on Newsmax's "Ed Henry The Big Take," as reported by Newsmax itself:

"If we don't make an example out of somebody that's just standing up and blatantly says she hates America, she wants the president to be dead, she backs everything that these communists talk about, and she's a fraud."

"So let's send her home. You know, this is a great country, but it's not as great as it could be without her in it. We need to send her back where she came from."

"She wants the president to be dead"

That's a serious accusation to make about a member of Congress on national TV. Tuberville offered nothing to back it up.

Even Newsmax, a friendly network, wrote in its own story: "Tuberville did not cite any statement in which Omar said she wanted Trump dead."

"Send her back where she came from"

Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia. She fled the country's civil war as a child, spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, and came to the United States in 1995. She became a U.S. citizen in 2000 and was elected to Congress in 2018.

Tuberville isn't talking about someone who's here illegally. He's talking about an American citizen who has lived here since she was a child.

And he's wrong about the law too. As Newsmax's own story explains, a naturalized citizen generally can't be deported unless a federal court first revokes her citizenship, and that requires the government to prove the citizenship was obtained illegally or through lies. Even then, deportation would be a separate legal process.

What he's hanging it on

Tuberville also blamed Omar for fraud. "The people that she represents, they've stolen millions and millions of dollars from the American taxpayer," he said. "She hasn't said one thing about it, to condemn it."

Newsmax's story connects it to Feeding Our Future, a fraud scheme involving roughly $250 million in pandemic-era child nutrition money in Minnesota. His claim that she hasn't condemned it is false: according to the same story, Omar has called the fraud "reprehensible" and says she wrote to the agriculture secretary demanding accountability when it came to light.

"The people that she represents" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Omar has also said Somali Minnesotans were themselves victims of the scheme: "We do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community."

Tuberville's comments came as the Trump administration says it's investigating Omar's immigration history, including a years-old claim that she married her brother. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said "something's going to happen." Border czar Tom Homan called it an "ongoing criminal investigation" but described no evidence.

Omar has denied the marriage claim for years and called it a bigoted lie. According to Newsmax, no publicly disclosed evidence or court finding has backed it up.

A pattern

This isn't a one-off for Tuberville. He has said New York City's mayor will someday do something "stupid" enough to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. He called a Muslim Senate nominee in Michigan a "terrorist sympathizer" for criticizing his anti-Sharia bills. And he told a podcast Alabama might need its own border wall because "they want to take this country over."

Now he wants to run Alabama.

What we know

On September 14, Tommy Tuberville said on Newsmax that Rep. Ilhan Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 2000, should be deported, saying "we need to send her back where she came from." He claimed she wants the president dead, and Newsmax noted he cited no statement saying so. He said she has never condemned the Feeding Our Future fraud; she has called it "reprehensible" and demanded accountability. A naturalized citizen generally cannot be deported unless a federal court first revokes their citizenship.