Rep. Ilhan Omar says she will move from her Washington home after federal agents raided it in an immigration probe she brands a political vendetta.
Minnesota Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar told an interviewer she can no longer stay in her Washington, D.C., apartment after Homeland Security Investigations agents executed a search warrant there on Oct. 12. About 15 to 25 agents pounded on the door at 6 a.m., spent nearly five hours going room by room, and left with 17 items, including several phones, she said.
Omar, her husband, and her 20-year-old son were home. She described the early-morning arrival as designed to rattle them and said the raid fits a larger effort to drive her out of public life. She also said her address is now public and that death threats make the residence untenable for her family.
“I mean obviously, I can’t continue to live there,” Omar said on MS Now in an interview that aired Wednesday. She added that she and her household have to find somewhere else “because our address has been public and with the death threats that I deal with, it’s no longer going to be feasible to be in that house and have my kids, like, visiting off and on, having people track them.”
The Guardian reported her account of the search and her plan to relocate. The same coverage placed the warrant inside a broader immigration investigation and recorded her denial of immigration-fraud allegations that have followed her for years.
Federal officials did not treat the stop as a photo-op. A Department of Justice spokesperson said Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Justice Department at Omar’s Washington-area home, and described the action as part of an ongoing federal investigation. National Review reported that framing and noted the probe focuses on immigration paperwork tied to Omar’s late father and the family’s entry path.
Border Czar Tom Homan and Vice President JD Vance had already confirmed that investigators were examining Omar’s immigration status and alleged fraud, including questions about a possible entry under a false name in 1995. That public confirmation came before agents hit the door in October.
House Democratic leaders called the search deeply disturbing and labeled it weaponization of government against a political adversary less than 30 days before the midterms. Omar went further. She said people around the president had kept “alluding to the fact that something was going to happen to me,” and argued agents “had to do something, I believe, to say, ‘Hey, look we raided her house.’”
“You don’t show up to somebody’s house that early in the morning unless you’re trying to freak them out,”
Omar said. She also claimed the larger goal is to push her into quitting. “Obviously, they’d like to see me locked up, deported and all of those things. But I think the bigger satisfaction for them would be for me to be like, ‘I’m tired of all of you and I’m going to leave.’” She insisted, “I have a legal right to be a member of Congress.”
The paper trail did not start on Omar’s stoop. The New York Post reported that investigators had earlier seized a phone belonging to Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, and that family text messages on that device helped persuade a judge to approve the warrant for Omar’s home. Agents took Omar’s phone, passport, notebooks, and personal computers. They had also recovered DNA from her trash in prior work.
Evidence is headed toward a federal grand jury in Minnesota examining whether Omar and relatives misrepresented immigration status around the family’s 1995 refugee entry, including alleged misrepresentation by her father. Family members have received subpoenas. Noor skipped a book event and cited a family emergency.
Omar’s office cast the entire effort as payback. Spokeswoman Jackie Rogers said the president has spread falsehoods about the congresswoman “in a desperate attempt to justify his extraordinary abuse of power,” called the case “politically motivated,” and described it as an escalation of a “personal vendetta against her lasting over a decade.”
Those are serious charges against federal agents, prosecutors, and a judge who signed a warrant. They also leave the core questions untouched: what the seized phones, passport, notebooks, and computers show, and what a Minnesota grand jury does with the 1995 file.
President Trump, answering reporters at the White House on Tuesday, did not soft-pedal his view of Omar. He called her a “sick, very dishonest person who hates our country.” Asked whether she could face deportation over alleged misstatements in immigration paperwork, he answered, “Well, she could be. She could also go to jail.”
Omar has long denied fraud claims and rejected old rumors about her marriage history as baseless. The Guardian noted those theories have circulated for years among her critics; the current case, as described by investigators’ steps, centers on paperwork, family communications, DNA collection, and a grand jury, not blog gossip.
No charging document appears in the available reporting. No arrest was announced at the scene. What is on the record is a signed warrant, a multi-hour search, seized devices and identity documents, prior trash pulls for DNA, subpoenas to relatives, and a grand jury track in Minnesota aimed at immigration fraud questions that date to the mid-1990s.
Omar’s public response has two tracks. One is safety: a public address plus death threats, she says, mean her children cannot come and go safely, so the family must move. The other is politics: she frames the 6 a.m. knock as theater for Trump’s base and says the real win for her opponents would be her resignation.
She recalled thinking “something was on fire” when the pounding started. That is a vivid memory of a scary morning. It does not explain why a judge signed off, why a sister’s phone texts mattered, or why passports and computers left the apartment in evidence bags.
Lawful immigration depends on honest applications. When federal agents, a warrant, and a grand jury focus on a sitting member of Congress and her family’s entry story, the country is allowed to watch the evidence, not only the press conference afterward. Omar is entitled to defend herself and to protect her kids. She is not entitled to wave away a judicially authorized search as pure vendetta without answering what the phones and files contain.
Democrats in leadership reached for the “weaponization” line before midterms. That is a familiar shield when one of their own draws scrutiny. It collides with the simpler sequence already reported: confirmed interest from Homan and Vance, a sister’s seized phone, a judge’s warrant, a dawn search, and a Minnesota grand jury.
Omar says she will pack up the D.C. apartment. Moving addresses is easy. Moving past sworn paperwork, device data, and grand-jury scrutiny is not. If the immigration file is clean, the process will show it. If it is not, members of Congress do not get a special exit ramp their constituents would never receive.
