Federal agents seized Rep. Ilhan Omar’s passport and devices in a Washington home raid as prosecutors build a case that could strip her citizenship and deport her.

Federal agents executed a search warrant at Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington bungalow and walked out with her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport, the New York Post reported.

Sources with direct knowledge said the Justice Department is hunting evidence that her long-standing claim of becoming a U.S. citizen at 17, when her father naturalized in 2000, does not hold up. Minnesota prosecutors are leading the immigration fraud probe. If investigators prove citizenship was secured by concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation, officials intend to pursue denaturalization and removal.

Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and Somali-born member of Congress, was home with her husband, Tim Mynett, when agents arrived. She has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. Her office cast the investigation as politics, not law.

"President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress. There is no basis for this."

Birth year records leave a hard question on the table

The core dispute turns on age. Some records list Omar’s birthdate as Oct. 4, 1981. Others list the same day in 1982. Her account is that she gained citizenship automatically as a minor when her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, naturalized in 2000.

If the 1981 date is accurate, she would already have been of legal age and ineligible for that minor benefit. That is the gap federal investigators are pressing.

Fox News reported that the Justice Department has issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas to family members, examining whether the family lied about her age when they immigrated in 1995 and when citizenship followed in 2000. Authorities are also reviewing paperwork tied to her late father for potentially untruthful statements. A separate track is looking at federal financial disclosures.

Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, is among the relatives subpoenaed. The family fled Somalia’s civil war in the early 1990s, went first to Kenya, and reached the United States in 1995. In fall 2018, Omar’s campaign told the Associated Press she did not have a birth certificate because of that displacement.

After she won her House seat, her staff in spring 2019 pressed the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, and Wikipedia to record her birth year as 1982 rather than 1981. The push came years after arrival and naturalization, and it is now part of the paper trail investigators are sorting.

Minnesota leads the fraud probe while D.C. eyes the money

By midweek, the Post confirmed Minnesota prosecutors are running the immigration fraud investigation. In Washington, the office of D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is pursuing an inquiry into Omar and Mynett’s finances, a second front that keeps both the congresswoman and her husband under federal scrutiny, including after Omar’s husband reappeared following the Homeland Security search.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Homeland Security Investigations received a tip about potential date-fudging during the Biden administration and did not move forward then, citing a lack of evidence. The current case did not stay shelved.

President Trump said Monday he had “nothing to do” with the probe. He still offered a blunt assessment of the Minnesota Democrat, calling her a “totally crooked” politician and “a terrible person.”

"Just a complainer. She comes from a country that is a non-country. And then she comes over here, and she complains about our Constitution."

Omar answered with a broader attack on the investigation’s motive. The Washington Examiner carried her claim that the case is enforcement turned into score-settling.

"Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation."

Mynett defended her entry story in plain terms.

"My wife came here when she was 12 years old as a child war refugee. No concerns."

Denaturalization is back on the books in a big way

Federal defense attorney Todd Spodek described the legal stakes without soft edges. A criminal conviction for knowingly procuring naturalization unlawfully, he said, “requires revocation of citizenship.” He also noted a practical barrier history has not yet crossed: a member of Congress has never been denaturalized before.

Criminal timing matters. Spodek pointed to a 10-year window on immigration fraud charges and a five-year statute of limitations on false statements. Civil denaturalization is different. There is no similar clock. If citizenship was obtained by concealment or willful misrepresentation, by Omar or through her father’s filings, the Justice Department can still seek to strip it and move her into removal proceedings.

Since the start of the president’s second term in January 2025, the Justice Department has filed almost 200 civil denaturalization cases. An analysis by the left-leaning group Democracy Forward found that only 20 of those matters had been closed with defendants placed into deportation proceedings. Volume is high. Completed removals are fewer. The pathway exists, and the department is using it.

That wider enforcement push sits alongside other Trump administration personnel and budget moves, including tens of thousands of federal workforce cuts in the first year back. Immigration law, in this case, is being applied to a sitting official rather than left as a speech topic.

Two investigations, one citizenship file

The seized passport is not a symbolic trophy. Travel identity, devices, and notebooks give investigators contemporaneous records, communications, and whatever biographical claims were stored or repeated in private. Grand jury subpoenas to more than a dozen family members widen the record beyond Omar’s own account.

Her office again denied any offense and framed the case as presidential retaliation.

"The Congresswoman has done nothing wrong. No president should be able to use the power of the federal government to intimidate his political enemies."

Words are not paperwork. The 1981-versus-1982 conflict, the 2000 naturalization claim, the 2019 effort to lock in the later year on official biographies, and the Biden-era tip that went nowhere all sit in the same file. Minnesota’s fraud probe and the D.C. finances inquiry run on parallel tracks. Progressive colleagues in the House, including high-profile figures who have faced their own money questions such as Ocasio-Cortez and lingering student debt on a $174,000 salary, are not the ones under this warrant. Omar is.

No charges were announced with the raid. No arrest was reported. The warrant, the seizures, the family subpoenas, and the dual-track inquiries are the concrete steps on the record. Omar’s public line is that she arrived as a child refugee and became a citizen lawfully through her father. Investigators are testing whether the age that made that path possible was true.

For years, Washington treated immigration violations as a debate club topic while ordinary cases piled up in states like Minnesota, where separate crimes tied to recent arrivals still break into the news, from fraud probes to violent cases such as an Ethiopian migrant charged in a St. Paul triple killing. A search warrant at a member’s home is a different signal. It says the citizenship file is not decorative.

If the government can prove willful misrepresentation on a naturalization chain, the statute does not include a celebrity exemption. Passports come out of the house first. The legal case comes next. Accountability that stops at the district border is not accountability at all.