Were the parents of Rep. Ilhan Omar ordered into immigration court to answer allegations that they falsified records to make them eligible for refugee status? No, that's not true: The meme spreading that claim originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer and a warning that all the contents of the page are made up. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content. There were no actual news reports on any such proceeding.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published by the America - Love It Or Leave It account on Facebook on July 6, 2025, with the caption "Looks like the whole fam may be headed back where they came from." It read:
Ilhan Omar will have to accompany her parents to immigration court to answer allegations that they falsified records to make them eligible for refugee status.
If the court finds that they gained residency fraudulently, the entire family could be stripped of their citizenship.
Omar, who came here when she was 11, says she won't leave even if they do take away her naturalization.
That's okay, though. She doesn't have to leave. She can go straight to Alligator Alcatraz and stay as long as she likes.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: screenshot of Facebook by Lead Stories)
The account that shared the meme is the creation of Christopher Blair, a self-professed liberal from Maine, who for years has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. He uses the nickname "Busta Troll." A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years.
