Read: The fight against female genital mutilation in Somalia

Omar was telling the truth when she said that she has made “statement after statement” condemning FGM. When discussing a bill before the Minnesota legislature, she averred that the practice is “heinous,” the “most severe form of child abuse.” She is not alone in using such harsh language. Many Somali officials, and officials belonging to the Somali diaspora, have similarly condemned the practice. Somalia’s provisional constitution says that “circumcision of girls is a cruel and degrading customary practice, and is tantamount to torture. The circumcision of girls is prohibited.” These are strong words, but they have had no reported effect on the rate of FGM in that country, where only 2 percent of women and girls escape the procedure.

After Omar’s election to Congress, a rumor went around the internet that while a state representative in Minnesota, she had voted against a bill prohibiting FGM in the state. This was not true. Omar voted in favor of the bill, which would have introduced felony criminal charges for parents who forced their daughters to undergo the procedure, and would have allowed Child Protective Services to remove the injured daughters from their parents’ care.

However, she had serious objections to the core aspect of the bill. “What I would have liked to have been done is for us to advocate for their parents to be charged with the laws that are currently in place,” she said—although no Minnesota laws were in place that punished parents specifically for FGM. There was only an as-yet-untested federal law that would later be found unconstitutional on the grounds that the matter was best left to the states. “What I would have liked,” Omar said, “for this bill to actually propose is what kind of level of charges that we would like to see brought up.” But what level of charges would be too much for a procedure that she had publicly called “the very worse form of child abuse”? She objected to barring the state from returning children to their parents’ homes if those parents arranged for them to be cut, questioning what further harm might befall them, and she suggested that the bill was just an attempt for media attention on the part of its sponsor. On the day of the vote, according to the bill’s sponsor, State Representative Mary Franson, Omar sat in an office watching the vote on television. She entered the House floor only to cast her own vote in favor of the law, despite her reservations.

Read: Democrats are falling into the Ilhan Omar trap

The bill failed to clear the state Senate, and did not become law, in large part because community groups representing the African diaspora in Minnesota objected to it. Isuroon, a nonprofit Somali women’s organization, argued that the penalties on parents were too harsh, and called the state efforts to eradicate FGM a “witch hunt.” The Council for Minnesotans of African Heritage also opposed the law. Republican* State Senator Karin Housley, who wrote the counterpart bill in the Senate, told the Star Tribune that she had come to fear that the bill would force the state into the position of “Big Brother,” rather than allowing immigrant communities to solve the problem from within their own ranks.* And this is the only direct protection that the girls in Omar’s district have against parents imposing FGM: no specific state or federal law, just the recommendation of a white Minnesota legislator that the state “empower communities to address this practice from within.”