The Trump administration is building a case that could lead to the deportation of Rep. Ilhan Omar, with federal agents seizing the Minnesota Democrat’s cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and her passport on Monday, according to a new report and people familiar with the investigation.
Omar has long maintained that she became a US citizen at the age of 17 when her father was naturalized in 2000, but sources with direct knowledge of the federal raid on her DC bungalow said the Department of Justice is looking for evidence that claim is a lie.
If the Somali-born Omar’s citizenship was procured by the concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation — either by herself or by her father, Nur Omar Mohamed — on immigration paperwork, then the feds will seek to denaturalize and deport her, one of the sources confirmed.
The 44-year-old congresswoman was at home with her husband Tim Mynett when agents executed a search warrant and removed the items, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Criminal charges could only be brought if the alleged immigration fraud occurred within the past 10 years, while if it concerned false statements there would be a five-year statute of limitations, according to federal defense attorney Todd Spodek.
Securing a criminal conviction for “knowingly procuring naturalization unlawfully requires revocation of citizenship,” Spodek said, though a member of US Congress has never been denaturalized before.
There’s no similar statute of limitations if civil denaturalization is pursued. President Trump’s DOJ has pursued a record-breaking number of civil denaturalizations, with almost 200 cases filed since the beginning of the president’s second term in January 2025.
Of those cases, just 20 have been closed with the defendants put into deportation proceedings, according to an analysis by the left-leaning group Democracy Forward.
The Post confirmed Wednesday that prosecutors in Minnesota are leading the immigration fraud probe into the “Squad” member, while the office of DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro is pursuing an inquiry into Omar and Mynett’s finances.
Some records list Omar’s birthdate as Oct. 4, 1981, while others give the same date in 1982. If the former date is accurate, Omar would have been of legal age at the time her father received citizenship and thus would have been ineligible for the minor benefit.
The Journal reported Thursday that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officials were tipped off about the potential date fudging during the Biden administration, but opted not to move forward due to a lack of evidence.
The Post reported Tuesday that in the spring of 2019, following Omar’s initial election to the House of Representatives, her staff pressed the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, and Wikipedia to record her birth as happening in 1982 rather than 1981.
Months earlier, in the fall of 2018, Omar’s campaign had told the Associated Press that she didn’t have a birth certificate due to her family’s displacement by the long-running Somalia civil war.
Omar has repeatedly denied any wrondoing, with her office insisting in a statement to the Journal Wednesday: “President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress. There is no basis for this.”
The Omar family emigrated first to Kenya during Somalia’s bloody civil war in the early 1990s, eventually arriving in the US in 1995. Omar’s father died of complications from COVID-19 in 2020.
More than a dozen grand jury subpoenas have also been issued to family members of the Minnesota congresswoman, including her sister, Sahra Noor.
Trump said Monday that he had “nothing to do” with the probe of Omar but called her a “totally crooked” politician and “a terrible person.”
“Just a complainer,” he told reporters. “She comes from a country that is a non-country. And then she comes over here, and she complains about our Constitution.”
