Federal officials carried out a dawn raid at the home of a Democratic congresswoman who’s long been a thorn in Donald Trump’s side.
The Homeland Security Investigations agency (HSI) searched 44-year-old Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C.-area residence on Monday morning, sources familiar with the operation told Fox News.
“Today in the Washington, D.C., area, Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice,” a DOJ spokesperson told the Daily Beast. “This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”
They said that the raid forms part of a criminal probe into her immigration paperwork, which her late father filled out after the family emigrated to the U.S. from Somalia when she was a child.
Trump, 80, has long railed against the progressive Minnesota congresswoman. “‘Scammer’ Ilhan Omar and her absolutely terrible friends from Somalia should all be in jail right now, or far worse, send them back to Somalia,” he wrote in a Truth Social post in January.
The president’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced last month that the Department of Homeland Security was conducting a criminal investigation into Omar, who has been a U.S. citizen since 2000.
The congresswoman told Fox News on Sept. 18 that federal investigators had not contacted her about the probe. She dismissed the allegations surrounding her immigration history as a politically motivated attack, telling the network: “The right wing has always had this s--t going, so I don’t really worry about it.”
Omar has become a favorite target of Trump and his allies amid a vast welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota, where prosecutors have brought cases against dozens of defendants, many of them of Somali descent.
The president has repeatedly attacked the state’s Somali community, and Omar in particular, over the alleged theft of public money, despite no evidence connecting the congresswoman to any of those schemes.
His administration cited the scandal as justification for its aggressive immigration crackdown in which thousands of federal agents descended on Minnesota late last year.
The operation prompted outrage across the country after officers shot and killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during separate confrontations in Minneapolis in January.
Other officials have thrown their weight behind Trump’s attacks on Omar. Vice President JD Vance said earlier this year that the DOJ was looking at whether Omar had engaged in immigration fraud, while Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has suggested deporting her if authorities can establish wrongdoing involving her family’s arrival in America.
Omar escaped Somalia’s civil war with her family when she was 8. She spent four years living in a Kenyan refugee camp before securing refugee status in America in 1995. She became a citizen five years later, at 17, and made history in 2018 when she became the first Somali American elected to Congress.
Her bitter feud with Trump stretches back to his first presidency. During a 2019 campaign rally in North Carolina, his supporters erupted into chants of “send her back” as he attacked the Minnesota Democrat.
The president renewed his calls to expel Omar in February after she interrupted his State of the Union address to protest his immigration crackdown. He declared that she and fellow Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, should be sent “back from where they came—as fast as possible.”
Tlaib, like Omar, is an American citizen—Tlaib was born in Michigan.
Trump, who has previously called Somali Americans “garbage,” renewed his attacks with a vitriolic Truth Social post last week. “The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants,” he wrote. “There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back.”
The Daily Beast contacted Omar’s office for comment. “This raid by Trump’s DHS is an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies,” her director of communications, Jacklyn Rogers, said.
“For a decade, Donald Trump has relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with inflammatory rhetoric, repeatedly putting a target on her back,” she went on. “Now, those attacks have escalated to a pointless federal raid. The Congresswoman has done nothing wrong. No president should be able to use the power of the federal government to intimidate his political enemies.”
The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment.
The White House declined to comment.
