Text messages pulled from Rep. Ilhan Omar’s sister’s phone supplied the evidence a federal judge needed to green-light a Homeland Security raid on the congresswoman’s Washington home in an immigration fraud probe her office calls a personal vendetta.
Department of Homeland Security agents hit Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. residence Monday, seizing her phone, passport, notebooks, and personal computers as part of a criminal inquiry into whether the Minnesota Democrat and her family lied on their way into the United States.
The warrant did not appear out of thin air. Federal investigators had already seized the phone of Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, earlier this year. Family text messages recovered from that device were then used to persuade a federal judge to authorize the search, the New York Post reported.
Homeland Security Investigations executed the judicially authorized warrant with Justice Department backing. A DOJ spokesperson confirmed the action sits inside an ongoing federal criminal investigation focused on immigration paperwork.
Before agents walked through the door, they had already gone through Omar’s trash. Investigators collected DNA from discarded material outside the home, an ordinary forensic step when agents need a comparison sample without a court order for a cheek swab.
Former FBI special agent Tracy Walder told NewsNation the tactic is straightforward.
"To me, if they are obviously trying to obtain DNA, then, yes, that is a very easy get, especially if it was discarded even in a trash can."
Evidence from the search is expected to go before a federal grand jury in Minnesota. Prosecutors want to know whether Omar and relatives misrepresented facts when the family entered the country as refugees from Somalia in 1995. Subpoenas have already gone out to several family members.
Omar has long claimed she became a naturalized citizen in 2000 at age 17 through her father, Nur Omar Mohamed. The current probe centers on the paperwork that father filled out when she was still a child, according to sources close to the case.
Fox News reported that two sources familiar with the investigation described it as a criminal fraud case into the Somali-born lawmaker’s childhood immigration forms. The early-morning operation left little doubt about the seriousness of the matter.
Border czar Tom Homan has publicly acknowledged the scrutiny. He told Fox News he flagged the issue months earlier and that the reports required a look. The Justice Department’s own statement made the same point without the politics.
"Today in the Washington, D.C. area, Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice. This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal investigation."
That language matches what a DOJ spokesperson told the Washington Examiner after the predawn search. No charges have been filed. The case remains at the investigative and grand-jury stage.
Sahra Noor, who now lives in Kenya and recently published a memoir titled “Salt in the Snow: A Somali Immigrant Story,” skipped a scheduled book event in Rochester on Thursday. She cited a “family emergency.” Her phone seizure months earlier supplied the texts that unlocked the warrant for her sister’s home.
The same investigation has already produced grand jury subpoenas aimed at Omar relatives, widening the circle beyond the congresswoman herself.
Omar’s spokeswoman, Jackie Rogers, declined to address the seizure of Noor’s phone directly. Instead she framed the entire episode as presidential revenge.
"Trump has spread lie after lie about the congresswoman in a desperate attempt to justify his extraordinary abuse of power."
Rogers added a second charge in the same statement.
"This is politically motivated and an escalation of Trump’s personal vendetta against her lasting over a decade."
Those are the defenses her office is running. They do not engage the underlying immigration paperwork questions, the DNA collection, the family texts, or the subpoenas already in circulation.
National Review noted that the probe also touches longstanding allegations Omar entered under a false or secondary family identity to skip refugee backlogs, and older claims she married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 to help him obtain a visa, claims she has denied. A Minnesota campaign finance board previously found she filed joint tax returns with another man while still legally married to Elmi.
National Review further reported that Homeland Security Investigations led the search with DOJ assistance, and that officials including Homan have confirmed the fraud focus remains live.
Readers tracking the case have already seen federal agents seize Omar’s cellphone during the same D.C. operation, a detail that underscores how thoroughly the search team cleaned out digital and paper records.
Sources previously told the Post that Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, misrepresented his identity when he reached the United States. He has been described as a high-ranking colonel who served a brutal Somali dictator whose rule left an estimated 200,000 dead. The family was admitted as refugees after the civil war.
Whether those earlier identity questions connect to the current paperwork fraud theory is exactly what the Minnesota grand jury is being asked to examine. The texts recovered from Sahra Noor’s phone apparently supplied enough probable cause for a federal judge to let agents inside the congresswoman’s home and walk out with her devices and passport.
That sequence, sister’s phone, family texts, judge’s signature, Monday raid, now sits at the center of the public record. Omar’s team can call it intimidation. Investigators call it a criminal fraud case built on documents the family itself submitted three decades ago.
The same facts have already prompted discussion of whether investigators could move to strip Omar’s citizenship if material falsehoods are proven, a possibility that raises the stakes well beyond a simple records search.
Senate Democrats have offered little public pushback while the case advances. One earlier report noted how Schumer has stayed quiet as the deportation and fraud angles sharpened.
For now the evidence trail runs from a seized phone in Kenya’s direction, through a federal judge’s warrant, into a D.C. living room, and onward toward a Minnesota grand jury. The texts did not invent the questions about 1995. They simply gave agents the key to look harder.
When family messages and discarded DNA are enough to open a congresswoman’s door, the immigration system’s old paperwork suddenly looks less like ancient history and more like unfinished business.
