Federal agents raided Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington home and seized her passport as investigators hunt evidence that could strip her citizenship and lead to deportation, a probe her office calls baseless intimidation.
Homeland Security Investigations agents were seen Monday at the Minnesota Democrat’s residence in Washington, D.C., carrying out a search tied to her citizenship status. U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that agents took her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport, Daily Mail reported.
Authorities have also issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to some of Omar’s relatives, seeking testimony before a Minnesota grand jury. The timing falls just three weeks before the midterm elections, with Omar seeking another term in the House.
A Department of Justice spokesperson said Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Justice Department as part of an ongoing federal investigation. National Review reported the action centered on immigration paperwork filed in connection with her late father.
The core question investigators are examining is whether Omar or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, altered her age on citizenship papers. She gained citizenship through her father in 2000. If she was 17 when he naturalized, she would have received automatic citizenship. If she was 18, she would have needed her own process.
Leon Fresco, a former top immigration official at the Justice Department under the Obama administration, told the Journal the case hinges on material evidence that Omar herself lied about her age, not that her father lied on her behalf. To strip citizenship, the Justice Department would have to file a federal lawsuit proving a material lie used to become a U.S. citizen.
Similar tips reached Homeland Security Investigations during the Biden administration. Those agents did not move forward, citing a lack of fraud evidence at the time. The current inquiry is broader and includes subpoenas served on Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, who runs a Minneapolis-based consulting firm, and at least one other relative.
Neighbors described an early-morning operation at Omar’s Northeast Washington home, with agents carrying out boxes of materials. The multi-year scrutiny involves her immigration history and possible false statements on forms, and any denaturalization fight would take years if false statements are proven, the New York Post reported.
Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, to an affluent family. The family later settled in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and then Minnesota as she entered high school. Public records long listed her birth date as October 4, 1981.
In May 2019, her aides contacted the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library. The library director later described the request in an email obtained by the New York Post: aides said “her birth year was incorrect and requested that we change it to 1982.”
The same message said aides were also lobbying Wikipedia and the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress to make the same correction. Wikipedia and the BBC had carried the 1981 date during her time in the Minnesota state House. The gap between the listed year and the requested year sits at the center of the age question investigators are now testing against citizenship paperwork.
In September 2018, after first winning her House seat, Omar addressed the issue directly. She said she became a citizen “before I turned 18” through her father’s naturalization.
"before I turned 18"
That public claim is now being measured against the documents agents seized and the grand jury subpoenas already in circulation. Separate allegations have long swirled around a 2009 marriage to Ahmed Elmi and claims it was meant to help him obtain immigration status. Omar has denied that Elmi was her brother and denied the marriage was fraudulent.
Readers following the cellphone seizure in the D.C. raid already know agents left with devices that can show what records Omar kept and what she communicated about her status.
On Wednesday, Omar’s staff pushed back hard in a statement to the Journal. They framed the entire effort as an attempt to sideline her.
"President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress,"... "there is no basis" for the investigation.
Omar herself struck a similar note after the search. She said she was unharmed and cast the raid as targeting of political enemies and weaponization of federal law enforcement. She has also said she will not be silenced. House Democratic leaders called the search deeply disturbing and pointed to the calendar, less than 30 days before the midterms, as proof of corrupt weaponization against Trump’s adversaries.
President Donald Trump, asked about the search on Monday, denied any role. He told reporters he had nothing to do with it and said the matter was really up to the Justice Department. He also branded Omar “totally crooked, personally.”
"I have nothing to do with it."
That leaves the investigation where it belongs under the law: with career prosecutors and agents following paperwork, sworn statements, and grand jury process. Coverage of the HSI search of Omar’s D.C. home has underscored that the warrant was judicially authorized, not a freelanced political stunt.
The day after the home search, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced her office is examining the congresswoman’s financial disclosures. Speaking to Fox News, Pirro kept the focus narrow.
"We're looking at the facts,"
Omar’s 2025 filing listed assets shared with her husband between $6 million and $30 million. She later amended the range sharply downward and blamed accounting errors. Last month, the House ethics watchdog recommended dismissing allegations over those filings. Omar’s office has pointed to that recommendation as clearing the air. Pirro’s review proceeds anyway.
The financial track sits alongside the citizenship track rather than replacing it. One day after agents left with Omar’s passport and devices, a sitting U.S. attorney put the disclosure paperwork under a fresh microscope. That sequence is laid out in reporting on the financial disclosures probe after the home search.
Sahra Noor’s consulting firm has described securing more than $20 million in funding for health initiatives and consulting on projects backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other groups. Federal prosecutors wanted her grand jury testimony as part of the wider family paper trail.
Citizenship stripping is not a press-conference penalty. It is a federal civil lawsuit in which the government must prove a material false statement used to obtain naturalization. Judges, not cable hosts, decide those cases. Even a strong paper trail can take years to litigate. No charges have been filed publicly in Omar’s matter, and no docket number has been released.
Still, the seizures matter. A passport, phones, notebooks, and computers give investigators primary records instead of secondhand tips. More than a dozen subpoenas mean relatives and associates are being compelled to testify under oath in Minnesota. That is how fraud cases move from rumor to evidence.
Omar entered Congress in 2018 as a high-profile progressive voice and has remained one. Her office now argues the probe exists to erase that voice. Investigators say they are testing whether the citizenship file that put her on the path to elected office was honest about her age. Those two stories cannot both be fully true.
Prior background on the ongoing criminal investigation into immigration fraud allegations shows this is not a brand-new tip invented for election season. The same family of claims has surfaced before. What changed is the willingness to execute a warrant, seize devices, and pull relatives before a grand jury.
Omar has answered the raid with defiance and a vow that she will not be silenced, a line tracked in follow-up on how Omar responded after the D.C. home raid. Voters heading into the midterms can weigh that rhetoric against the simple facts agents carted out of her house in boxes.
Elected officials who write immigration law should expect their own immigration files to withstand daylight. If the records are clean, the lawsuit never lands. If they are not, citizenship was never a shield against accountability.
