Rep. Ilhan Omar said Oct. 21 that a "bizarre" federal investigation into her citizenship is part of a campaign by President Donald Trump to use the immigration system against his political opponents.
The Minnesota Democrat gave her first account of the Oct. 12 predawn search in which federal agents pounded on her doors and carted away phones, notebooks and family keepsakes.
"You don’t show up to somebody’s house that early in the morning unless you’re trying to freak them out," she said.
Omar told MSNOW's Chris Hayes that the raid was the payoff to months of threats from the White House, which had been "alluding to the fact that something was going to happen to me." As right-wing influencers began to doubt those promises would be kept, she said,
the administration "had to do something."
The raid at her home began at 6 a.m., she said, describing how she had been asleep for barely two and a half hours when agents pounded on the front and back doors. She said she thought something was on fire.
For the next several hours, agents from Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, moved through her Washington-area home room by room. When they left, Omar said, they carried 17 items, among them her youngest daughter’s first phone, a camera her husband’s uncle had kept from his years in the Navy, and a book her husband had been using to learn Somali.
"To walk away with 17 items of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones was such a bizarre, bizarre thing," she said. The agents who came to her door were courteous, she said, even folding some of her clothes as they put the house back in order. But Omar said they did not follow all of the conditions a judge had set for the search.
She was not allowed to call her attorney until about an hour in, Omar said. She also says agents never notified the House general counsel, as the warrant required – an alleged lapse her lawyers have also raised with the Justice Department.
Agents also asked her to sign a waiver of the speech or debate clause, the constitutional protection that shields members of Congress’ legislative work from prosecution. She refused.
The search, three weeks before Omar faces voters in Minnesota, is part of a probe aimed at revoking Omar's American citizenship and deporting her if investigators can prove that she or her relatives lied to immigration authorities when she became a citizen in 2000, at 17.
The Justice Department has subpoenaed some of her relatives and questioned her sister, USA TODAY has previously reported.
At the center of the investigation is whether Omar or her late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, listed her age as 17 instead of 18 when he applied for citizenship that year, which allowed her to become a citizen through him as a minor, USA TODAY reported. Investigators are also probing her father’s past military history.
"The people who knocked on my door searching for papers literally have his papers," Omar said.
During Trump's first term, DHS declined to pursue an investigation into Omar based on similar allegations after determining there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing, The Washington Post reported. That the same department now claims otherwise, she said, "tells you how political this whole investigation is."
Omar was born in Somalia and fled with her family after civil war tore through the country, spending four years in a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, before resettling in the United States. She scoffed at the idea that she could be held responsible for a process that began when she was a child, saying it would be a huge undertaking to indict "a 12-year-old" for conspiring to defraud immigration authorities.
As a member of the progressive group of lawmakers known as the "Squad," Omar has become one of the most recognizable and polarizing Democrats in Washington – and one of Trump’s most frequent foils, whom he has often held up as a symbol of the immigration he wants to curb.
Trump has said he had nothing to do with the investigation, casting it as the Justice Department’s decision alone. Omar dismissed that outright. "Oh, absolutely not," she said. "He’s got everything to do with it." She pointed to the officials now involved in the case, nearly all of whom have publicly attacked her.
The timing of the new probe has also drawn scrutiny. For decades, the Justice Department has followed an unwritten practice known as the "60-day rule," avoiding overt steps in politically sensitive investigations in the two months before an election, and officials have long considered a public search of a politician’s home exactly the kind of action to avoid. Trump himself invoked the rule in 2024, accusing special counsel Jack Smith of interfering in that year’s election.
The department has pushed back, calling the rule an informal practice rather than written policy.
During the Oct. 21 interview, Omar said her family will not return to the house that agents searched, since its address is now public and she already receives a steady stream of death threats. But she struck a defiant tone about what comes next.
She said she believes the people behind the investigation ultimately want her to tire of the fight and leave Congress, because they have never accepted that someone of her background and faith should serve there. “I have a legal right to be a member of Congress,” she said, adding that she was confident she had done nothing wrong.
“I’m confident in my truth,” Omar said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ilhan Omar says Trump is behind raid designed to 'freak' her out
