This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Is Donald Trump’s immigration agenda about to get even more draconian — or less? 

What’s happening? As of Monday, immigration hardliner Stephen Miller — and if anything, “hardliner” undersells it — is Trump’s new chief of staff. 

Miller, who was also a senior aide in Trump’s first term, is an ideologue and the force behind many of Trump’s harshest immigration policies, such as a 3,000-arrests-per-day quota for ICE officers; broadly speaking, his elevation forebodes an even darker and more aggressive final two years of Trump’s presidency.

It’s also sharply in contrast with Trump’s recent comments on immigration in his first sit-down interview since his party’s midterms wipeout. 

What did Trump say? In an interview with 60 Minutes’s Ross Douthat that aired Sunday, Trump not only conceded that some of his immigration policies “might be too tough” and had hurt his party at the polls, but he floated the possibility that a bipartisan immigration deal could be “actually doable.” 

“There’s a large part of the country that thinks that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscaping company or working in a hotel or doing something,” Trump told Douthat. 

What’s the context? Trump has occasionally flirted with immigration legislation, including a first-term proposal pairing a citizenship deal for DACA recipients with border wall funding and legal immigration cuts that never went anywhere. More recently, in June 2025, he expressed similar concerns about the impact of immigration enforcement on hospitality and agriculture, but the change didn’t live out the week. 

Will anything come of this? Anything’s possible, especially with powerful Democratic majorities incoming. But it hasn’t happened yet, and with Miller in the chief of staff’s office, it remains unlikely, to say the least. (Plus, some very loud parts of his own party absolutely hate the idea.)

On Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the likely next speaker of the House, said Miller “is a stone-cold racist. … I’ve got zero interest in working with that kind of individual.”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Have you seen an “Ask me about metro” hat out in the wild recently? What about an ugly Christmas sweater with a train on it? 

If so, you’re not alone: Public transit merch, The Atlantic reported, has been experiencing a boom lately. (I’m not immune to it: I have an Amtrak poster on my wall.) You can read all about the trend with a gift link here. 

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Unlike projecting how many jobs AI may eliminate over the next 10 years, or what a country’s birth rate might look like, there’s far less debate among policymakers about how large America’s older population will be in a decade’s time, and how many of them are likely to need direct care for disabilities.

By 2036, as the baby boomers continue to retire, the US population 65 and older is expected to grow from 65.6 million to 77.5 million people, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The number of people 85 and older is also expected to nearly double in that time, from 6.8 million to 11.1 million.

The question of whether the United States will have enough direct care workers — an umbrella term that refers to home health aides, personal care aides, and nursing assistants — looms large. These are workers, primarily women, who help older adults and people with disabilities bathe, dress, eat, take their medication, and generally get through a day, either in a nursing home or in someone’s own home. It’s a massive, often ignored workforce (the American Community Survey estimates there were 3.62 million of them in 2024) and it’s paid for largely by Medicaid, the joint federal-state health insurance program that most people associate with coverage for impoverished Americans but which is actually the dominant payer for long-term care in this country. 

Depending on which researcher you ask, the US will need somewhere between 625,000 and 1.3 million additional direct care workers over the next decade to keep pace with the growing number of older and disabled Americans — and that’s just to maintain today’s level of care as the population ages, not to fix the shortage that already exists. If you’ve talked to anyone currently trying to coordinate long-term care, you probably already know the country is understaffed as it is.

To close the gap, policy experts say the United States should bring more immigrants into a sector that’s already about one-third immigrant, while also protecting the roughly 12 percent of current direct care workers who are noncitizens, some of them undocumented. PHI, a national nonprofit that researches and advocates for the direct care workforce, projects 9.6 million direct care job openings between 2025 and 2035, the bulk of which will come from existing workers changing fields, retiring, or otherwise leaving the workforce.

“We can’t do it with the current US-born workforce,” Amy Robins, the senior director of policy at PHI, told me. “We need to have mechanisms where people can come into this country and do this work.”

Immigration reform has felt politically impossible in Washington for years, but after the brutal defeat Republicans suffered in the midterms, there’s a suddenly a much stronger case that this corner of the fight is different. Days after the election, President Donald Trump gave an interview saying his deportation policy was “too tough” and he’d be open to some sort of immigration reform deal to protect workers. In September 2025, Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) reintroduced a bill to recover green cards that went unused in earlier years and redirect them to nurses and doctors. Coordinating care for older adults is a problem that reaches families in every corner of the country, and even comfortable households wonder whether they can secure a dignified life for an aging parent, or, eventually, for themselves.

With family caregivers growing in number and nursing homes turning residents away because they can’t find staff, caregiving may be the one corner of immigration policy Congress is actually willing to fix.

A growing menu of options

Over the last year or so, three different proposals have emerged that suggest that caregiving is the immigration battle Washington is finally ready to fight. 

In July 2025, Reps. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) and Veronica Escobar (D-TX) introduced the Dignity Act, which pairs tougher border enforcement with legal status for undocumented immigrants who’ve been in the country since before 2021. It also offers permanent residency for Dreamers and a handful of green card reforms. Salazar herself has pitched the bill partly as a remedy for the same aging-population squeeze driving the caregiver shortage, and eldercare groups such as LeadingAge and the American Seniors Housing Association have thrown their support behind it. 

The legislation rests on an idea at the center of the caregiving political fight, which is that immigration enforcement alone won’t get the US the labor it needs.

Since then, the Dignity Act has gathered around 40 cosponsors, split nearly down the middle between the parties, and this spring it won the endorsement of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of roughly 60 members whose mandate is passing legislation both sides can live with. Following Trump’s recent comments that he’d be open to an immigration deal, Salazar praised him on X, urging him to throw his weight behind the Dignity Act. “You can surpass Reagan’s legacy by delivering a historic immigration reform,” she posted. “This is your moment.”

There are other ideas on the table, too. Over the summer, Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-NM) introduced the Careworker Visa Act, a bill that would create a new temporary visa allowing up to 100,000 immigrants a year to work in childcare, eldercare, and home-based disability care. It would also let some immigrants already living in the US obtain work authorization through the program and give participating workers a pathway to permanent residency.

“We all know that immigrants are already taking on these jobs in large numbers,” Vasquez told me. “One of the conversations we’re having amongst the Democratic coalition is how to craft meaningful immigration-related legislation that can be bipartisan on a couple specific issues. And certainly this bill rises to the very top of that conversation.”

And the most recent entry came in September, from Tara Watson, an economist at the Brookings Institution. In a new caregiving visa proposal, she offers the idea of a visa open to immigrants with at least two years of direct care experience who want to come to the US to work as home health aides, personal care aides, or nursing assistants. It would start at 30,000 visas a year before rising to 65,000 after three years, and employers would have to pay above-market wages and provide health insurance.

Learning from what didn’t work

Neither of the two dedicated caregiving visa proposals is starting from scratch. In 1999, Congress created a visa for nurses to work in understaffed hospitals, but the process had such strict eligibility rules that fewer than 15 hospitals nationwide ever qualified to use it. And it was burdensome for qualifying workers, too: If a nurse ever wanted to switch their hospital, they had to start their visa certification process all over again. Over the course of a decade, barely a thousand visas were ever issued, and lawmakers let the program expire in 2009. 

Other countries have gone the opposite direction. The UK made care workers eligible for its Health and Care Worker visa in 2022, and the numbers took off almost immediately, with 106,000 visas granted in 2023 alone. But exploitation was rampant. Some contracts required workers to repay thousands of pounds to their employer if they left before their visa term was up — one worker’s contract demanded more than 11,000 British pounds — which made leaving a bad job financially impossible for people who’d often already gone into debt just to get the job in the first place. More than 43,000 workers were affected when their employers’ sponsor licenses were revoked amid widespread reports of exploitation. The UK ended overseas recruitment for care workers in 2025, though the broader Health and Care Worker visa remains in place.

Both experiments reflected the fact that workers often had no way out, no matter how poorly an employer behaved. Watson and Vasquez say they kept that front of mind when crafting their proposals, both of which allow workers to switch jobs rather than staying locked to whoever sponsored them. 

“You really do see this tension — the more you try to make sure the workers are protected, the more onerous it becomes for the employers,” Watson told me. “You’re choosing between scale and some of those restrictions. I’m trying to hit somewhat of a middle ground.”

Vasquez pointed to the H-2A visa program for farmworkers, which he said has also had real, ongoing problems with employers abusing the system. 

“Anytime that we are creating new programs for immigrant workers in which their job status depends on them achieving legal status, we should always be aware that there may be bad folks that are seeking to abuse that system,” he told me. “That’s going to require some thoughtful support for the Department of Labor for enforcement of laws just like this.”

States can’t fix this alone

These federal ideas build on top of a patchwork of state-level attempts to raise direct care wages in order to incentivize more people living here to enter and stay in the field. Yet for all the state mandates, bonuses, and training programs, care programs are usually among the first casualties when money gets tight. And even in states that have pulled off real wage increases, inflation has frequently swallowed those gains before they could do much to close the gap.

LeadingAge, which represents nonprofit nursing homes, assisted living communities, and home care agencies, says no single state’s budget can fix this. Linda Couch, the organization’s senior vice president of policy, says states are now facing significant cuts to their Medicaid funding under last year’s federal budget law, which will squeeze what providers can pay their staff.

“Federal policymakers hold a lot of the cards for systemic change to meet the needs of older adults,” Couch told me. “Without action to secure immigration reform and reverse Medicaid cuts, we’re putting access to aging services at risk for older adults across the country.”

LeadingAge’s members are already feeling this. Couch said one of its Massachusetts members, Hebrew SeniorLife, had to let go of nearly 40 Haitian workers this year after their Temporary Protected Status ended, some of whom had worked there for more than a decade. A Florida provider lost 10 workers from Cuba and Haiti after a humanitarian parole program shut down.

Congressional Republicans to date have primarily rallied around tax credits and retirement protections for the nation’s 63 million family caregivers. Robins of PHI, though, doesn’t see the two approaches as inherently at odds. 

“There are way more family caregivers in this country than there are direct care workers, and that will always be true,” she told me. It’s a “yes, and” when it comes to supporting family caregivers, she said, and direct care workers are a “fundamental way that we support family caregivers who are taking on tremendous care responsibilities in our country right now.” A paid home health aide coming a few days a week, in other words, can be what lets a daughter or spouse keep working, or just get a full night’s sleep, while still caring for a parent at home.

The population who will need this care by 2036 is already here. It may not be much, but caregiving, as Watson said, is “low-hanging fruit, if there is any low-hanging fruit.” In an immigration debate this stuck, that counts for something.

What do a Bollywood actor, a member of Congress, and Israeli directors have in common? 

It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. The punchline, though, is that governments of India, the United States, and Israel, respectively, think they should be stripped of their national status.

Bollywood star Imran Khan, nephew of Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan, was told he has until October 28 (and since extended to November 2) to leave India, where he resides on an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card. India doesn’t allow dual citizenship, but OCI status gives individuals of Indian descent and their family members the right to permanently live, work, and study in India; its revocation uproots its holders from their homes and their lives. Khan had protested in a demonstration demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, India’s chief election commission. He is challenging the order in court.

Earlier this month, US Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home was raided by federal authorities who are reportedly preparing a case to strip her of citizenship, alleging that her father said she was 17 when she was really 18 when he filed her naturalization paperwork. President Donald Trump subsequently said that, because a federal court filing allegedly referred to her as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar,” she should have to resign from Congress.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has intimated that Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, directors of the film NAZA, in which Abraham interviews Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers on Tel Aviv rooftops about how they assessed and decided to kill civilians in Gaza, could be stripped of their Israeli citizenship, saying he would pursue legislation to go after critics of the military who crossed a line. “We will revoke citizenship for anyone who defames IDF soldiers around the world — he will be deeply hurt in his pocket,” said Netanyahu, who cited the filmmakers as a potential example and called their work “intolerable.”

The move to strip citizens of their passports and their rights is not a new one, nor is it limited to these three countries. Perhaps most famously, Jews were stripped of citizenship by the Nazis in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. To take a more recent example, over the summer, Russia passed legislation that effectively strips Russians abroad facing domestic prosecution on political grounds of their citizenship (the law takes away their property, freezes their bank accounts, and refuses them consular services).

Still, that three high-profile cases are coming from three countries that claim to be democracies raises the question: Why do reactionary leaders in democracies reach for denaturalization (or quasi-denaturalization, in the case of loss of OCI) as a weapon against political and cultural elites? What do they hope to gain? And, relatedly: What might they lose instead?

It’s not just about the high-profile targets

Reactionary leaders do not typically threaten to make an example of high-profile political opponents or cultural elites as a first step. In each of these cases, there are demographic groups — whole swathes of the population — whose governments have been trying to disenfranchise, denaturalize, or deport them (or some combination of the three) long before the recent spate of high-profile headlines. 

In India, there’s currently a politicized election integrity push that experts warn could illegitimately prevent tens of millions of voters from marginalized groups, especially Muslims, from participating in elections. What should have been a routine clean up of voter rolls ended up with 130 million — nearly 10 percent of the population — struck off the lists. The sweeping approach has raised widespread concern from critics that many voters will be incorrectly removed — and deep suspicions that this disenfranchisement is targeted and intentional.  

Mukulika Banerjee, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, noted this happened after the position of chief election commissioner was made partisan and given immunity for life. And while normally in India (unlike in the United States) the onus is on the state, not individuals, to register voters, in this case, the state said that if people were to be put back on the voter rolls, they “had to produce a whole bunch of documents…which by implication affected the socially disadvantaged,” per Banerjee. 

That meant women, people from lower castes, rural voters — and, since “the Muslim population amongst the most seriously socially disadvantaged, the likelihood of Muslims falling in this category is very high,” Banerjee, author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India, said. In places like West Bengal, where Muslims make up nearly 30 percent of the population, there were some assembly constituencies where, in elections earlier this year, the number of names deleted from the rolls was greater than the margin of victory, and while anti-incumbent sentiment was high and the BJP may well have won anyway, some, per Banerjee, are asking, “was this an attempt to choose the electorate, so to speak.”

In the United States, the Trump administration has made denaturalization a priority, hoping to find people they can make an example of as part of their broader immigration crackdown. They have already filed to strip dozens of Americans of their citizenship by claiming they lied on their naturalization paperwork (“Justice Department Moves to Strip Citizenship from 40 Criminals in Largest Single-Period Filing Under the Trump Administration,” a press release from earlier this month crowed). The White House also tried, unsuccessfully, to revoke America’s constitutional right to birthright citizenship, which could have left future generations far more vulnerable to removal or persecution.

And in Israel, Palestinians have long been made to feel the weight of citizenship — and the heft of its absence. This is not only true in, say, the West Bank, where Jews live as citizens but Palestinians live under occupation and military law, but in East Jerusalem, where most Palestinians are permanent residents, not citizens, meaning they cannot vote in general elections for the Israeli legislature.

“That is a tool that Israel has used in a different way that could easily be transplanted to citizens,” said Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst on Israel at Crisis Group. And if you can strip residency from Palestinians in Jerusalem, maybe you can strip citizenship, too. “If this government is reelected, I could see that becoming a less and less crazy idea” as what was once unthinkable becomes “normalized.” Palestinian citizens in Israel have expressed the same concern.

The chilling effect of deportation threats 

How — and why — does an aspiring authoritarian move from threatening the rights and status of demographic groups to going after elites?

Sometimes, the elites are — in addition to being outspoken and high profile — from the demographic group under threat.

Several years before Khan’s OCI status came under threat, the Modi government took journalist Aatish Taseer’s OCI card from him. This happened in 2019 — months after Taseer authored a Time story with “India’s Divider in Chief” plastered across the cover, after which the prime minister himself said, “Time Magazine is foreign. The writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility.” Taseer’s father was indeed a Pakistani political figure, but this was hardly some secret of which Taseer had made offhand mention; Taseer had written about his father and the role his absence and rediscovery in his life, including in his first book, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands.

And so with Imran Khan, Taseer said in a phone interview, there is an element of, “Just get the Muslim out” (Khan’s mother is Muslim). In Taseer’s own case, he said, he became “the Paki.”

The same is true at least in one high-profile case in the United States: Omar is Muslim and from Somalia, two groups that frequently attract the ire of the Trump administration. Recently, Trump urged Minnesotans to “fight back” against Somali immigrants before the state is “taken over.” Omar is also a prominent and progressive member of Congress. 

“It’s got these two levels,” Taseer said. “One is an ethnonationalist agenda. The other is a blunt instrument of coercion.” If you speak out too freely, Taseer added, “you won’t be able to return home.”

The blunt instrument, though, is more narrowly applied than, say, stripping people from voter rolls en masse. It is designed to cause fear among elites: journalists and actors and academics.

And it is meant, Banerjee said, to raise the price of protest.

The government’s first instinct, she said, is to call protesters terrorists and anti-nationals, rather than citizens exercising their rights: “They don’t seem to understand that to peacefully protest is there in…the constitution.”

And by taking a Bollywood star’s OCI status, the government can “make an example and say, look, we can take the biggest and the richest and the most prominent.” It is a message to the rich and the famous and the powerful: Do not think you are bigger than government coercion. You are not.

Whether it works is almost beside the point. Trump is facing an uphill legal battle in proving that an error committed by Omar’s father, if indeed any error exists, means she should lose her citizenship. Omar has said she sees the administration’s goal as exhausting and intimidating her to the point she leaves politics — something she says will not happen. 

And, it’s unlikely, Zonszein said, that Abraham and Szor will actually be stripped of citizenship given Israel’s own judicial protections. But, “It’s an empty threat, but one that works, because it chills dissent, it stifles it, it makes people scared.”

It also suggests that, regardless of whether you’re a member of the targeted group, or have some special status that could set you apart, power can come for you, too. That can scare people out of speaking out for the marginalized. It can also alert them into the need for doing so.

“When it happens in a democracy, one has to always keep one’s radar attuned to who is suddenly becoming prey, whether it’s LGBT in Russia or now in Turkey or in this case in India, Muslims, Taseer said. ”It’s sort of — what they’re going to those people, they’re going to eventually do to the population at large. It’s not one of those things where they’re like, ah, let us do this little thing, and then you guys can all live happily ever after. It’s generally always accompanied by a deeper authoritarian turn.”

For example, in addition to threatening Abraham and Szor, Israel has revoked the entry permits of American Jews who volunteered to work with and protect Palestinian farmers during harvests and froze aliyah — the name for the process by which Jews abroad immigrate — of two Jews over their pro-Palestinian West Bank activism, which, as Israeli outlet Haaretz reported, could be a violation of Israeli law guaranteeing the right of all Jews around the world the right to move to Israel and become citizens. 

“I mean, anybody with their head on straight would say, if you treat one person this way, it’s not that hard to treat another person this way,” Zonszein said. “That’s pretty basic, obvious stuff.” 

President Donald Trump has been attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) since she first entered Congress in 2019. At various points, he’s called for Omar — a progressive lawmaker who came to the United States as a child refugee from Somalia and who is one of Trump’s most vociferous critics — to be investigated, arrested, and deported. 

Now, Trump’s Justice Department is seemingly trying to make good on his threats. Last week, Omar’s Washington, DC, home was raided by federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to the Wall Street Journal, the raid was part of an investigation into her immigration paperwork with the explicit goal of denaturalizing and deporting her.

The timing alone would make the raid unusual — it’s rare for the Justice Department to take action in political cases so close to an election — and as Washington Post immigration reporter Ted Hesson explains, it also feels uncomfortably pretextual. “It’s almost as if the outcome of the investigation has been stated before anything has taken off,” he told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. 

Hesson joined Sean to talk about the long history of Trump’s attacks on Omar, what the agents might have been looking for, and whether the administration could actually undermine Omar’s citizenship or even deport her. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What do we know about what federal agents were looking for in Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, DC, residence?

What we’ve learned through our reporting is that the investigation has looked at both her birth date and whether [Omar or her father] may have lied about it on the naturalization application. 

A second piece is whether, looking at her father’s military service, she was born in Somalia and was there during the civil war and fled with her family as a young child to a refugee camp in Kenya and was there for years before they eventually came to the US as refugees.

This is the president of the United States and his administration entering a sitting representative’s home to figure out what her original birthday is. What is the motivation here, to the best of our knowledge?

For years, President Trump has criticized Rep. Omar and made unsubstantiated accusations related to immigration fraud. 

There have been theories circulating on the far right — again, unsubstantiated — that she had married her brother as part of an immigration fraud scheme. President Trump himself has repeated that. And several top Trump administration officials in the last few months have said that they believe that there is fraud in her background. They’re making these statements prior to there being an investigation, prior to there being evidence put forward. And it’s almost as if the outcome of the investigation has been stated before anything has taken off. 

One thing I should say is that while it does appear that they’re looking at her birthdate, when refugees come into the US, it’s extremely common that their birth records are unreliable because people are fleeing countries that are often in disarray, whether it’s due to civil war or other reasons. 

Often, nations like Somalia don’t maintain accurate birth records. So it’s common that refugees who’ve left their country as children, spent time in refugee camps, and then come to the US don’t have a solid understanding of when exactly they were born. I don’t know for sure that that’s the case here, but I know that generally when you’re dealing with refugees, that is true.

I know there’s a lot we don’t know here, but investigators enter Rep. Omar’s home. Potentially they’re looking for some documents that may list her birthday. If they find some information that’s maybe contrary to official government records, what could that mean, in theory?

It’s unclear what sort of charges could be brought from this. And part of the question is, was she 17 and a child at the time of that application or was she 18? 

Even if it was determined that she was not a child, I don’t believe they would be able to, say, launch a denaturalization process based on that fact alone. And even if they did attempt to do something like that, these things are not taken lightly and it’s a long involved legal process and very uncommon to pursue something like this over something as simple as this sort of paperwork discrepancy.

The president has a long history of hating on Somalia and Somali immigrants to this country. 

How does this investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar fit into the president and his administration’s broader efforts to take away American citizenship?

In the past year especially, we’ve seen President Trump use really inflammatory and derogatory language to refer to Somali Americans and Somali immigrants in the US. Even for someone who frequently employs anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the president has in his past, some of the things he said went beyond even that. He does seem to have particularly targeted Somalis in the US and Somali Americans, and Rep. Omar has been part of that. 

I think what’s interesting here or what could be interesting is that this case wades into different territory of taking somebody who’s a naturalized citizen, who’s been in the US for decades as a citizen, and saying, “We’re potentially going to reopen that and go back and look at your file and see, do we find anything that might be out of line?”

The idea that you could do that with someone who’s a sitting lawmaker could mean that you could potentially do that to any other person who may have applied.

Now, one thing we’ve learned is that in the case of Rep. Omar, the administration has looked at the idea, in the event that criminal charges can’t be brought, of potentially canceling her citizenship certificate. It’s almost like a fast-track way to disrupt someone’s citizenship. 

It doesn’t remove it. You remain a citizen, but you lose the document that is the underlying proof of that, which could then cause problems with federal government documents, and it could even lead to immigration proceedings where the government tries to make the case that you should be deported.

How has Rep. Omar responded?

Her camp has vociferously pushed back against the allegations. 

In regard to the search, they’ve actually said that there was a court-ordered guideline that should have been followed, and that involved consulting the counsel for the House of Representatives before the search happened. They said that never happened, and if it had, it would’ve given Rep. Omar perhaps time to prepare for this or some sort of legal recourse. 

They’re saying that not only is this continuation of President Trump’s attack on her politically motivated, but also that the actual legal guidelines that were outlined in that search warrant were not followed.

Are other Democrats speaking up on her behalf?

Former President Barack Obama in particular is one extremely prominent person who came out and made a social media post elevating her case. 

The interesting part is that President Obama does not often weigh in on public debates like this or is at least measured in the opportunities when he does. So it comes with more gravity to hear him stepping in and raising concerns about this. 

I think it speaks to the fact that he thought this was very significant. And if you remember, President Trump’s political career was built on the narrative that Barack Obama was not born in the US.

I do remember, Ted.

And the hunt for his birth certificate. You can imagine that former President Obama saw a parallel here and realizes that this mirrors the sort of attacks that were made on him when he was in office.

We’ve talked about President Trump a bunch in this conversation, and he’s made no secret of his disdain for Rep. Omar and the country from which she comes. What has he explicitly said about this investigation?

He’s saying that the Justice Department is acting independently. That said, he has been extremely critical of Rep. Omar in his public statements and continues to be. And the president himself and other top officials have said that it should be investigated. 

We’ve had, for months now, a sort of public encouragement of top officials and saying that they should be looking into this. So whether he’s directly liaising with them or whether they’re just reading his social posts, it may be kind of a nuanced distinction. He’s publicly saying he wants this to be pursued.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump wants to deport a member of Congress. 

What’s happening? On Monday, Homeland Security officers raided the Washington, DC, home of US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in an investigation reportedly tied to immigration paperwork filled out by her father when she was a minor.

That was, at the time, more than enough cause for alarm. Trump’s animosity toward Omar, who is Somali-American and an outspoken critic of the administration, is well-known, and the raid is an extraordinary violation of the Justice Department’s usual rule to avoid taking visible action around politically sensitive cases within 60 days of an election. 

On Wednesday evening, however, we learned more about the raid from the Wall Street Journal. The Omar investigation, the Journal reported, is explicitly aimed at stripping Omar of her citizenship — and thus her ability to hold office — and deporting her. 

How would they do that? Omar came to the US as a refugee when she was 12 and became a US citizen when she was 17. The Trump administration’s investigation is said to focus on whether she or her family misrecorded her age in order to more easily gain citizenship. 

The government cannot unilaterally denaturalize a citizen, however; it would have to ask a court to do so.

What’s the context? Historically, it’s rare for the US to strip citizenship from naturalized US citizens. But doing so at volume has been a major, if less visible, priority for the second Trump administration. 

As of earlier this year, NBC News reported, DOJ was targeting hundreds of people for possible denaturalization, and has reportedly hoped to put forward hundreds of new cases per month (though successfully stripping them of citizenship is another matter).

Why does this matter? Trump’s campaign to bend the traditionally nonpartisan DOJ into a tool to punish and harass his enemies has been one of the major stories of his second term. 

Even if it never advances beyond Monday’s raid, an investigation targeting Omar’s citizenship with the eventual goal of deporting her from the US represents a new and even more dangerous evolution of that effort — and it threatens to move the US to a far darker place, where citizenship and the rights it guarantees are predicated on the president’s goodwill.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers — if you’ll allow me to depart a little from my normal approach to this section, I have a story about politics to share. It’s not, however, about the politics we’re currently dealing with, but about what could be: Democrats’ plan for a quietly ambitious “Project 2029” should they win the White House in 2028. You can read it with a gift link here.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to just log off, here’s an adorable snow leopard cub with massive paws. Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Democrats’ Laken Riley vote is aging badly

Two things happened this week that reveal how quickly the politics of immigration enforcement are shifting.

First, Republican Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, urged the administration to dial back its enforcement push. “Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years,” Justice told Politico this week. “I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff.” And he’s not the only red-state Republican who’s been pushing back on ICE lately, including some facing voters in tough races next month.

The second thing flew under the radar: Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat running for reelection who has also been floated as a 2028 presidential candidate, struggled to explain himself when a reporter confronted him on camera about his vote for the Laken Riley Act in January 2025. Passed within days of Trump’s inauguration and signed nine days into his second term, the law requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are merely arrested for or charged with theft-related crimes, before any conviction.

In the exchange with a reporter from Drop Site News, Ossoff talked about his Senate work investigating alleged ICE abuses, but didn’t directly address his vote after being asked if he regretted it. “Laken Riley was my constituent and what happened to her should happen to no American, to no person in this world,” Ossoff said. “I think that immigration enforcement should be focused on those who are convicted or charged with serious crimes.” He excused himself to walk into a meeting as the reporter pressed him on whether the law undermined due process. 

In both cases, you see changing winds of electoral politics. Back in 2025, when Ossoff and 11 other Senate Democrats joined Republicans in supporting Trump’s immigration bill, they implicitly validated Trump’s premise on immigration enforcement: that not only was the border out of control, but that there also needed to be new efforts to step up interior enforcement through expanding agencies like ICE. In the year-plus since that vote, Trump has hired more ICE officers, launched sweeping raids in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and fueled a cauldron of chaos that’s led to shootings across the country. Politically, it has now put Democrats like Ossoff in a pickle, one that will matter more the closer we get to 2028.

How do you explain giving more immigration powers to a Stephen Miller-led White House? How can one argue you couldn’t have seen this coming?

In some ways, you can understand the political logic of the time. Ossoff, who is running in a state Trump carried, and many of the congressional Democrats who supported the Laken Riley law were in competitive races, and Democrats left the 2024 election thinking they had misread the electorate on the issue, particularly after Latino voters swung hard toward the right. But given what’s happened since, it’s clear many congressional Democrats made a familiar mistake: prioritizing political triangulation over standing on their values of protecting marginalized communities.

Take a look at some of the Democrats who have already had to walk back their votes. In the Democratic primary for Minnesota’s open Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan made US Rep. Angie Craig’s vote for the law a key focus of her campaign, calling it “disqualifying.” The attacks were so effective that Craig eventually expressed remorse, saying, “I wanted to be honest with the people of Minnesota. I will tell you when I get it wrong, and I got that one wrong.” Craig lost the August 11 primary to Flanagan.

Maryland’s April McClain Delaney, another congressional Democrat, also said she regretted her vote: “I will say that this was in the beginning of my term. And I never thought that ICE immigration and the horror of what has happened would happen.” (She survived her primary, defeating David Trone by 6 points.)

It’s easy to see where the buyer’s remorse is emanating from. Trump’s ICE is broadly unpopular. And as we’ve talked about on this Substack and in our reporting on America, Actually, Trump is doing worse and worse with Latino voters, with both prices and immigration enforcement driving the slide. A Hart Research poll for TelevisaUnivision of 1,500 Latino registered voters in battleground House districts (August 6–17) found 63 percent disapprove of Trump’s job performance and 62 percent disapprove of his handling of immigration enforcement and deportations. Sixty-four percent view ICE unfavorably. 

When I recently talked to Stephanie Valencia of Equis Research, she said this: 

The people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. Like, they were told he was gonna focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was gonna focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.

But while the shift in public opinion helps explain the elected officials’ political logic, it doesn’t change the material harm of their votes. Just this week, ICE announced plans to hire 5,000 more employees, most of them deportation officers, by the end of the year as enforcement continues to ramp up.

And these raids have a lasting effect on targeted communities, like in Maine, the Chicago area, and Texas. It’s the No. 1 issue that has come up in my conversations with local reporters. The chief architect of this chaos is the president, but make no mistake: Trump had help from shortsighted Democrats.

One thing I’m hearing 

Maya Miller is a Report for America corps member covering democracy and government for the Gulf States Newsroom, a public radio collaboration that includes Louisiana’s WWNO and WRKF. She’s been reporting on Mississippi’s redistricting fight and what residents are saying about their representation and the upcoming midterms.

You’ve been reporting from redistricting hearings in Mississippi. What are residents most concerned about, and is there a conversation or moment that captures the mood?

Residents are most concerned about their representation. In Mississippi in particular, race and party are strongly intertwined, and Black residents worry that by being drawn into new districts, voters may elect a Republican candidate. There was a bit of secrecy around redistricting earlier this summer, with Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, canceling a special session to redraw judicial lines. So advocates created the People’s Hearings, a series of meetings held across the state to voice concerns and create a public record of testimonies from Mississippians. Quickly after, lawmakers decided to host their own public hearings, and at these hearings, hundreds of residents showed up, mostly to urge them not to redistrict.

“It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts.”

At one hearing, I spoke to Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis, president of the Natchez NAACP. She’s frustrated that the state is going to spend millions on new maps when people are struggling with day to day expenses. And Ramona Sanders of Meridian, Mississippi, has a lot of concerns on whether mid-decade redistricting is illegal. While it’s not, she says that lawmakers are opening themselves up to legal action. I haven’t heard anything from voter advocacy groups that points to future lawsuits, but only time will tell, if and when lawmakers redraw the maps, if these maps are constitutional or not.

Redistricting is often covered as a fight over which party wins more seats. What would these changes mean for the communities you cover and their ability to have a voice in Congress?

One change that could happen is that residents who are Democrats might lose the state’s only Democrat leader. Out of four congressmen, there’s only one Democrat, Bennie Thompson, who represents District 2. His district spans much of the west, from the capital city of Jackson to most of the Mississippi Delta and southwest Mississippi. It’s a heavily Black district, somewhere around 63 percent Black. He’s held this seat for 33 years and has brought millions to the district for health care, infrastructure, and agriculture. 

So residents are worried that Republicans are trying to edge him out and replace him with a more conservative leader who may not have the same concerns as the community. 

How are these fights affecting people’s interest in the midterms? Are you hearing more determination to vote, more doubt that voting matters, or something else?

People are fired up. They’re incredibly engaged. I’m hearing from a lot of people who are more determined to vote in November than when I covered redistricting in Alabama in 2024. It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts. So they’re attending hearings, participating in rallies, registering to vote and checking their registration, phoning a friend and making plans to be at the polls on November 3.

What is the national conversation about redistricting missing that becomes clear when you spend time in these communities?

I think the national conversation is missing the voice of the community. It’s one thing to report on the politics of redistricting, but there’s a layer of real concern from residents that shouldn’t be ignored. They’re worried about hospitals closing. They’re worried about public schools losing funding. They’re worried about the rising cost of groceries and gas. I find that talking to and listening to residents helps me understand a community more than calling up a lawmaker and asking them their thoughts. There’s a place for that side of the conversation, of course, but I’ve always tried to center people who will be most impacted in my reporting, and I feel that leads to a better story for our listeners.