Miles Taylor Dismisses Possible Ilhan Omar Naturalization Fraud As 'A Tiny Paperwork Error'

Eugene Daniels Miles Taylor MS NOW The Weekend 10-17-26

Tiny, my eye!

On Saturday's edition of MS NOW's The Weekend, Miles 'Anonymous' Taylor—dressed as ever in pleather—a disgruntled former Trump 1.0 administration member, discussing the Trump administration's investigation of Ilhan Omar's naturalization status, said that "a tiny paperwork error" would not be grounds for stripping her of her naturalization.

Tapping the usual partisan MS NOW line, co-host Jackie Alemany had already framed the Omar probe as "unprecedented and insane." And Kimberly Atkins-Stohr of the Boston Globe played the race-religion card, casting the case as President Trump going after "the black Muslim woman." 

Although Taylor didn't specify the "tiny error" he was referring to, it was almost certainly that, long after she was naturalized, Omar had her congressional staff change her birth year on official records from 1981 to 1982.

That's anything but tiny. If indeed, as has long been on the record, she was born in 1981, she would not have been a minor at the time her father was naturalized, and thus would not have been naturalized along with him. Moreover, falsely changing her DOB to preserve her naturalization could be a crime in itself.

There's a separate issue as to whether her father was naturalized under false pretenses. He claimed to be an "educator," and a refugee from Somalia. But reporting has pegged him as a colonel in the brutal, totalitarian Siad Barre regime who remained loyal until the regime fell in 1991. Willful concealment of material facts on naturalization forms is a statutory ground for revocation. If the father's naturalization is revoked on that basis, Ilhan's derivative citizenship claimed through him could be lost as well.

Taylor’s dismissal of a birth-date change that determined whether Omar was eligible for derivative citizenship at all as nothing more than “a tiny paperwork error” is more than an understatement. 

Mr. Anonymous deliberately downplayed a potential fraud that could end with Ilhan on a one-way flight to Mogadishu.

Here's the transcript.

MS NOW
The Weekend
10/17/26
7:20 am EDT

JACKIE ALEMANY: The Wall Street Journal reports that the administration's investigation is aimed at trying to build a case to strip the congresswoman of her citizenship and ultimately deport her. Kimberly Atkins-Stohr and Miles Taylor are back with us.

Kimberly, can you just help us take a step back and talk about how unprecedented and insane this is, that a sitting president is trying to use the powers of the presidency to deport a congresswoman for the second time?

KIMBERLY ATKINS-STOHR: Yeah, so first, I mean, just the number of rules and norms that this breaks. First of all, legislators have broad protection under the speech and debate clause, so I would be interested in seeing that warrant and how it was limited with that in mind. I know Congresswoman Omar had some questions about that. She was alleging that there was a violation of rules that are meant to protect that speech and debate protection.

ALEMANY: Well, apparently the Post reported that prosecutors were going back and forth with the federal judge who signed off on this warrant extensively about keeping within the parameters of the speech and debate clause, but still taking your --

ATKINS-STOHR: -- taking your device, your phone, and going after, yes.

ALEMANY: So, there's that issue. There's also DOJ policy that before, 60 days before an election, you are not supposed to be engaging in some sort of operation like this, so that blatantly goes against it.

ATKINS-STOHR: But just stepping back with Donald Trump, I feel like this is a sense that he understands the desperate position Republicans are in going into the midterms, because he seems to be falling back into well-tread ways, retribution, going after his enemies. What enemy is he going to go after? Oh, the black Muslim woman, because that's an easy thing. That's why you see Pete Hegseth going in on trans people. That's why you see these boogeymen coming back out of the surface in this retribution.

. . .

EUGENE DANIELS: Miles, you were the chief of staff at the DHS during the first term. Spectacularly and publicly left, and, and opened some eyes into what was happening. But when we talk about denaturalization, it is not a process I think that a lot of Americans understand. Can you talk about how high the bar is? Because there, to, to be denaturalized, for someone to come here, get citizenship, and for us to take that away, the bar is high, and it should be.

MILES TAYLOR: The bar is very, very high . . . But as you note, this is not the type of thing that, a tiny paperwork error can lead you to be denaturalized. That bar is high for a reason, because once the United States government says you are a citizen, taking that back has remarkable ramifications.

But this White House has been keen on doing that as a display of federal power, and as a threat to those who would speak out against the president.