Rep. Ilhan Omar said she does not know if she married her brother, a hedged answer after federal agents searched her D.C. home in an immigration probe.
In her first sit-down interview since the search, the Minnesota Democrat denied wedding her former husband to commit immigration fraud and tried to bat away years of questions about whether the two are related. She spoke with MS NOW host Chris Hayes days after Homeland Security Investigations agents executed a court-authorized warrant at her Washington residence.
Federal agents carried out the search on Oct. 12 as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into possible false statements in her immigration and naturalization documents. U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew J. Sharbaugh of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia approved the warrant. The Justice Department has not publicly detailed the specific allegations.
Omar framed the operation as politics. She told Hayes she believes the search was meant to appeal to Republican base voters and to intimidate voters. She denied wrongdoing and called the investigation politically motivated.
The sharpest moment came when Hayes pressed the familial-relation claims that have trailed Omar for years. Her answer was short and carefully limited.
Omar replied:
"Not to my knowledge."
Fox News reported that she also walked through how she says the story began. She pointed online rather than offering a flat, categorical family history.
Omar told Hayes:
"It all started with the Somali blog. Somebody put it there, that he had to have been my brother or something to that effect."
She denied marrying Ahmed Nur Said Elmi for immigration benefits. The hedged reply on whether he is her brother left the core public question unresolved even as federal investigators continue examining her records. Coverage of the same allegations has included examination of whether prosecutors hold DNA that could test the family claims.
Omar is a Somali-born Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota. The marriage-and-immigration questions have followed her through multiple campaigns. A clear denial would have been simple. “Not to my knowledge” is not that denial.
The Oct. 12 search was not an isolated knock at the door. The Associated Press reported that federal authorities issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to members of Omar’s family, and seized her cellphone. Both the immigration-documents investigation and a separate finance inquiry remain open.
Those grand jury steps match earlier reporting on how grand jury subpoenas hit relatives inside the same probe. Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, spoke with federal investigators last week after the search of the D.C. home.
Homeland Security Investigations agents ran the residential search. A source familiar with the operation described it as occurring early Monday morning. Omar’s office has not responded to repeated requests for comment from Fox News Digital beyond the public interview and her own posts.
Court authorization matters. A federal magistrate judge signed off before agents entered. That process undercuts the claim that the search was a free-wheeling political stunt with no legal foundation. Investigators still have to prove any false-statement case in court. They already cleared the warrant threshold.
Alongside the immigration-documents case sits a separate inquiry into Omar’s campaign finances and financial disclosures. That track reportedly began in 2024 during the Biden administration. Congressional ethics officials had previously dismissed a complaint about wealth disparities in her disclosures.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced last week that authorities outside the Capitol are now examining the matter. The shift from an internal ethics dismissal to an outside criminal-side look raises the stakes. Lawmakers who police other people’s paperwork rarely enjoy the same scrutiny when their own forms draw questions.
Background on how investigators reached the residence has focused on family texts and the HSI raid sequence that preceded the warrant service. Omar continues to cast the entire effort as partisan pressure rather than evidence-driven work.
After the search, Omar’s first public appearance came in a social media video filmed from the back of a car. She asked supporters to keep sending money. Only later did she sit for the Hayes interview, her first media Q&A since agents left her home.
The fundraising turn landed while federal investigators held her phone and had already served family subpoenas. Watchdogs tracking the case have cautioned that more shoes will drop as the dual probes move forward. Omar’s message to donors treated the search as an attack to be met with cash, not as a signal to offer fuller public answers.
Body-language and messaging scrutiny followed that solicitation video in separate coverage of how Omar solicits cash after the D.C. search. The political incentive is plain: keep the base angry, keep the small-dollar money moving, and brand any investigator as a partisan actor.
The Justice Department still has not laid out the precise false-statement theories under review. No case number or full warrant text has been released in the public reporting. Omar’s interview supplied denial of a fraud purpose for the marriage and a hedged answer on blood relation. It did not close the file.
Federal agents do not need a cable-news narrative to seek a warrant. They need a judge to find probable cause. Judge Sharbaugh made that finding. HSI agents then searched the home, grand jury subpoenas went out to the family circle, and a phone was taken into evidence. A parallel finance track that once died in ethics channels is now live under the U.S. attorney’s office.
Omar wants voters to see a persecution story. The record so far shows a court-authorized search, active grand jury process, and a member of Congress who will not give a clean answer to the simplest family question at the center of the public controversy.
Immigration rules bind ordinary applicants every day. When a sitting lawmaker faces questions about her own filings and answers with “not to my knowledge,” the public is right to expect investigators to finish the job.
