The Trump administration wants to strip Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her US citizenship and then deport her, according to US officials and others familiar with the case who spoke to the Wall Street Journal.
What's more, DHS agents who searched Omar's Washington home early Monday secured her passport, along with her cellphone, personal computers and notebooks while Omar and her husband stood around watching, the report continues. Over a dozen subpoenas have also gone out for testimony before a Minnesota grand jury, some of them to Omar's relatives, and the family's immigration paperwork is one of the things prosecutors are combing through.
Investigators want to know whether Omar or her father listed her as 17 rather than 18 on her citizenship paperwork, according to the paper's sources. The one-year difference decides how she became a citizen: a child under 18 could pick up citizenship automatically through a parent's naturalization, while an 18-year-old would have needed to go through the process on her own. Omar became a citizen in 2000.
Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, brought the family to the US in 1995 from a Kenyan refugee camp. He drove a cab and worked for the Postal Service, and died in June 2020 at 67 of Covid-19 complications, according to Omar. The probe is looking at his conduct as well as hers.
Homeland Security Investigations examined a similar tip under Biden and dropped it for lack of evidence of fraud, according to people familiar with that review.
Omar told the Journal earlier this year that she never committed immigration fraud. "President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress. There is no basis for this," her office said in a statement Wednesday.
Trump, meanwhile, has called for Omar's deportation for years. On Monday evening, hours after the search, an Ohio crowd he was addressing broke into chants of "deport" after he turned to Omar and Somalis. "They cheat on everything," Trump said, according to the paper.
The denaturalization route matters because of the calendar. As we noted on Tuesday, federal prosecutors have ten years to bring criminal charges for naturalization and passport fraud, which puts anything filed in 2000 out of reach. Civil denaturalization cases have no statute of limitations, and relatives who derived citizenship through a parent can lose it too, according to the Congressional Research Service. The Justice Department still has to sue in federal court and prove, by "clear, unequivocal, and convincing" evidence, that citizenship was obtained through a material lie.
The administration has filed more than 200 denaturalization suits this term, which officials tout as the most sweeping such effort in DOJ history. Before Trump's return, the government filed about 12 or fewer annually, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data cited by the paper. Most of the new cases are still undecided. Omar's, if it is filed, would be the highest-profile yet.
As we reported Monday, HSI agents executed a court-authorized warrant at the house around 6 a.m., and the Justice Department called it part of an ongoing criminal investigation without saying more. The New York Times reported that the warrant cites false statements, immigration-paperwork fraud and conspiracy, according to Newsweek, and that the grand jury has subpoenaed Omar's sister, Sahra Noor. Vice President JD Vance said he had no advance notice of the search, and Trump said it was "really up to the DOJ."
The age question has a paper trail. On Tuesday we flagged emails showing Omar's congressional staff asked Minnesota's Legislative Reference Library in May 2019 to change her listed birth year from 1981 to 1982, days after a viral video questioned her age. The library's legislator page now gives her birth date as Oct. 4, 1982. Under the 1981 date, Omar was 18 for all of 2000; under 1982, she was 17 until that October. The emails don't say what documentation, if any, backed the change.
Separately, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney in Washington, said Tuesday on Fox News that her office is investigating Omar's financial disclosures, which put her husband Tim Mynett's two businesses at as much as $30 million for 2024 before an April amendment cut the couple's reported assets to $18,004-$95,000. Back in April we noted Omar's sudden discovery that she is not a multimillionaire after all. In September, the Office of Congressional Conduct recommended that the House Ethics Committee dismiss the allegations. Pirro waved that off: "It doesn't matter what the House does," she said.
The immigration allegations have followed Omar since her 2016 run for the Minnesota House, often tied to her marriages. Last month, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on a conservative podcast that the investigation was ongoing and claimed Omar "married her brother" to get him into the country - something Trump has frequently claimed as well.
