Back in 2011, President Barack Obama mocked then-private citizen Donald Trump to his face at a White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner over the then-reality TV star’s conspiracy theorizing that the president was born in Africa and, therefore, ineligible to be president.

“As some of you heard, the state of Hawaii released my official, long-form birth certificate,” Obama said. “Hopefully, this puts all doubts to rest. But just in case there are any lingering questions, tonight I’m prepared to go a step further. Tonight, for the first time, I am releasing my official birth video.”

He then showed a clip from “The Lion King” of baby lion Simba being held up for all to see.

What was once a punchline is now policy and persecution under Trump. Fueled by resentment over Obama’s humiliation of him in 2011, Trump launched a political career fueled by authoritarian desires for xenophobic and racist purges of unwanted groups from the country. In his second term, Trump has embarked on a vicious campaign of mass deportation that has roiled the country, filed record numbers of lawsuits to denaturalize citizens and attempted to end the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.

This is what birtherism looks like as policy. And his administration’s attack on Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar is the latest and most tyrannical escalation of this.

On Monday, Homeland Security officers raided the home of Omar, a four-term congresswoman from Minnesota who was born in Somalia and is Muslim, as part of an investigation into her. The purpose was unclear at the time — but it looks increasingly like a fishing expedition to find anything that could be used to denaturalize her and remove her from the country.

The investigation purportedly seeks to prove that Omar lied on her citizenship application, which was submitted by her now-deceased father, Nur Omar Muhamed, according to the Wall Street Journal. During the raid, investigators seized her cell phone, computers and her passport, the Journal reported.

A DOJ spokesperson previously told HuffPost that the search warrant was judicially authorized and added the “enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation,” though the spokesperson would not provide any details about the justification for its probe.

Omar, born in 1982, came to the U.S. as a minor with her father as a refugee in 1995 and became a citizen five years later at age 17. Investigators are reportedly looking into whether Muhamed or Omar lied about her age when applying for citizenship. Naturalized citizens can be stripped of their status if they are found to have lied in the application process. But this is a lengthy process that must be adjudicated in court. There is no public evidence that either Muhamed or Omar lied on their application, and Homeland Security officers previously investigated this allegation but found no evidence to support it.

This attack on a sitting congresswoman merges Trump’s bigoted worldview with his authoritarian penchant to abuse the government to punish his enemies. Not only is he abusing law enforcement to target a critic with no existing evidence that she committed a crime, something he has done to other Democrats, but he is seeking to remove her from the body politic entirely.

Trump has targeted his political opponents many times before, including through aspects of their personal lives: Baseless allegations of mortgage fraud against New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff, attempting to indict Sen. Mark Kelly and other Democratic lawmakers for sedition while Trump called for their execution, an entire Department of Justice investigation apparently seeking to prosecute various political foes, and many more. But the attempt to completely eradicate an opponent not just from American public life, but from America entirely, is an egregious escalation of both his anti-immigrant rhetoric and his effort to abuse his office to pursue his enemies. No member of Congress has ever been stripped of their citizenship or targeted for such an investigation.

And it gets to the heart of Trump’s birtherist policy agenda. Fomenting an investigation into Omar is both an act of retribution, as she is a fierce critic of his administration, and an exercise in line-drawing. Omar, the only Black Muslim immigrant in Congress, is a symbol to Trump and his supporters of who should not count as an American citizen. By trying to deport her, she becomes the highest-profile example of where Trump’s line of exclusion stands, and sets a new bar for who he considers a legitimate target.

This is clear from Trump’s rhetoric, which cannot be disentangled from the investigation.

Trump has called Omar “garbage,” told her to “go back” to Somalia, said she should “get the hell out” of the country, mocked her hijab as a “little turban” and falsely claimed that she married her brother as part of an immigration fraud scheme. These attacks spurred countless death threats and an assault by a man who sprayed Omar with liquid from a syringe.

After the raid on her home, Trump continued to attack her at a rally in Ohio in flatly racist and xenophobic terms. He claimed that she came from “one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet.”

Trump then went on to say the same about Somali-Americans as a group: “They came over here. They had nothing. They came from a government that doesn’t exist. They come from a part of the world that only knows how to kill each other.”

On other occasions, Trump has put his opinion of Somali-Americans plainly: “I don’t want them in our country.”

This echoes a previous statement by Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration advisor, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the president’s effort to change the constitutional grant of birthright citizenship by edict.

“We have people from all over the world, from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel,” Miller wrote online. “And they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen? That baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you and sit in judgment of me and sit in judgment of our loved ones? Can decide who our mayors are? Our governors are? Our presidents are?”

This is a manifestly racist conception of who can be American. It is the opposite of what Ronald Reagan said in 1988 when he read a letter sent to him: “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. … Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.”

But Trump believes that people must be judged by their place of origin and not as individuals. With Obama, Trump argued, falsely, that he could not serve as president because he was maybe born in Africa. The purpose of this lie was to make the public feel that a Black man could not be a legitimate president.

Some groups just can’t be American. That belief is the heart of Trumpism, and it is at the heart of the investigation into Omar.

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