The FBI announced the arrest of a Somali-American teenager who was hoping to kill dozens of people at the Mall of America after affiliating himself with ISIS. And it turns out he is another illustration of why our current unconstitutional birthright citizenship system is such a disaster.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s framers and ratifiers certainly never intended to allow every single individual who happened to be present on American soil at the moment of his birth to be considered an American citizen, because the amendment did not apply to Native American Indians. And of course, the current catastrophe has nothing to do with the amendment, sincethere’s a whole industry built around shipping pregnant foreigners here to give birth at scam centers, and illegal aliens can bring the whole family in on the strength of an “anchor baby.”
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud is an American citizen simply because he was born here. His parents are citizens now, but they had not yet obtained their naturalization at the time they had him. His parents are originally from Somalia. Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin shared the information:
NEW: I'm told by federal sources that the parents of the 18-year-old man arrested by the FBI for allegedly plotting an ISIS inspired mass shooting at Minnesota’s Mall of America are both Somali nationals who first flew into New York in 2000 and were later naturalized into U.S. citizens. Mom in 2010, dad in 2017. It's unclear how they initially came in (visa, refugee, etc). The suspect, Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, was born in the US in 2008 before his parents were naturalized, and he received his US citizenship as a result of birthright citizenship. DOJ says Mohamud's parents refused to speak with the FBI when they tried to make contact with the family last year when there were initial indications of potential radicalization.
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) October 7, 2026
Related: Just Before October 7, FBI Thwarts ISIS-Tied Plot for Mall of America Mass Shooting
The Trump administration recently ended temporary protected status for Somalis, which originally began in 1991. Obviously, the designation had long outlived its temporary justification, although in the meantime, it allowed large numbers of Somalis to come and live in America for decades on end. Then many of those families had children here, and once they had that American citizen in the family, it was much more difficult to send them back home.
Some people have complained about this case, that the Feds evidently knew this individual was leaning toward terrorism a while ago, raising the issue of federal agencies prioritizing entrapment over other preventative measures. But I think the much bigger issue here, the one that not everyone is noting, is that just because you are born in and grow up in America with parents who remember living in poverty and tyranny does not mean you will be grateful for citizenship here.
Mohamud’s parents came here from Somalia because Somalia is an Islamic country plagued by terrorism, tyranny, and widespread poverty. Yet obviously they did not raise their son to consider himself lucky to live in a free country. They raised a son who was so in love with fundamentalist Muslims who massacre infidels that he decided to ruin his life at the age of 18 by planning a mass casualty shooting at the Mall of America. Melugin stated that the FBI tried to warn Mohamud’s parents last year that he was heading toward this end result of explicit terrorism, but his parents didn’t want to talk about it.
A phrase that comes up periodically among critics of mass migration is “you can take the man out of the Third World, but you cannot take the Third World out of the man.” I actually disagree with this because there is evidence in American history of immigrants arriving here from highly impoverished or oppressive countries and becoming assimilated patriots. The real issue here is Islam, which is not only a religion but very much a political ideology always seeking to establish control over more and more countries.
Thus, we might say more accurately “you can take the Muslim out of the sharia dictatorship, but you cannot always take the sharia dictatorship out of the Muslim.” Every nation that has allowed in large numbers of Muslims always ends up becoming a sharia tyranny. That is the historical precedent for over a millennium. Mohamud is an American citizen born and raised, but he feels much more allegiance toward a foreign terrorist organization — ISIS — than to his country. This is precisely the problem with allowing everyone to be a birthright citizen regardless of who the parents are.
