A raid on controversial Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, DC, home signifies law enforcement has already amassed compelling evidence of criminal activity and are nearing the end of a long investigation, a source told The Post.
The most likely scenario, multiple people claimed, is that immigration cops are looking into a long-floated rumor that Omar is actually one year older than she has long claimed to be — a tiny detail that may put her citizenship in jeopardy.
“The big picture here is a federal judge in Washington, DC, signed off on a search warrant. That means there’s probable cause that a federal crime was committed, and there would be evidence of that crime in the area to be searched, which in this case was Representative Omar’s home,” former assistant US attorney Jonathan Fahey told The Post.
Officials from DHS raided the controversial Minnesota congresswoman‘s Washington, DC, home early Monday morning, removing boxes from the residence.
“Today in the Washington, DC, area, Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice,” the DOJ said in a statement.
“This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal investigation.” the statement concluded.
The Post also saw agents carrying boxes out of the residence to government vehicles, one of which was white and marked with a pink X.
A defiant Omar took to social media following the raid to announce “I will not be silenced” and called the action “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”
But Fahey said it’s not easy for feds to get a DC judge to sign off on a search warrant, especially since DC judges tend to be hostile to the current administration’s whims.
“For a DC judge to sign off on something that’s 20 years old, you have to say you believe there is current evidence of the crime in her house,” he said.
“A judge must have been very convinced.”
While feds have kept a tight lip on what they’re expecting to find at the Omar residence, one source who requested anonymity given the politically charged nature of the investigation, suggested it might relate to longstanding, unverified claims that Omar misrepresented her age to get citizenship.
Omar claims she received automatic US citizenship in 2000 at age 17, granted to minor-age children of naturalized parents — in this case her father, Nur Said Mohamed Elmi, who fled to the US in 1995 from war-torn Somalia.
In 2019 concerned citizen and Minnesota local AJ Kern was the first to publicly call attention to Omar actually being 18 or 19 in 2000, at least according to state documents at the time. If Omar was actually older than 17 at the time — as some believe — she would have been ineligible for citizenship via the parent route.
Two days after Kern released a viral video about Omar’s alleged real age, Omar’s official birth year on the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library’s website was revised from 1981 to 1982, according to Kern, who pointed to archived versions of the site which revealed the change.
Congressional records today report Omar was born in October 1982, making her 17 at the time of naturalization.
One source confirmed to The Post that naturalization fraud has a ten year statute of limitations.
But if Omar had continued using the fake birthday on things like passport renewals or bank loan applications then the statute of limitations resets. Cops, the source said, could be looking for exactly that sort of documentation when they raided the Rep’s home.
Fahey agreed, noting that DHS’s involvement means the case is specific to immigration issues.
“A federal judge saw something that said, we believe there’s evidence of a crime that will be found in that house, and presumably it would be something that’s not just a crime beyond the statute of limitations,” he said.
“There could be new crimes committed that stemmed from that previous fraud.”
Omar has never publicly produced a birth certificate, claiming such paperwork was destroyed during the turmoil in her native country. She did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The raid, which began hours before dawn, came just weeks after Border Czar Tom Homan revealed that Omar was under an ongoing “criminal” investigation and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin stated on a podcast “something’s going to happen” as investigators look into Omar’s broader family migration story.
“Generally a search warrant is occurring towards the end of an investigation because you’re building up evidence that led to this search warrant,” said Fahey. “To get to the point of searching a home, you’ve developed a case for a fairly decent period of time.”
Controversy has long surrounded Omar’s marriage to her second husband, Ahmed Elmi, a flamboyant, self-described “dirty dandy” rumored to be her brother and currently writing a thesis about “queerphobia in Kenya” at Bristol University in the UK.
Multiple sources agreed that DHS isn’t looking into that marriage. For one, the statue of limitations for marriage fraud ran out five years after the couple divorced in 2017.
Contrary to what many believe, the claim is actually that Omar married her brother so that he could get US citizenship while she was already a citizen — a federal crime, if true, but one that wouldn’t jeopardize her own citizenship nor would it involve DHS entering the mix.
Incest charges would only be brought with evidence of sexual contact, per Minnesota state law.
Accusations that Elmi was, in fact, Omar’s brother first emerged from Minnesota’s Somali community itself. Local bloggers alleged the mysterious, effeminate Elmi blew into town in the late 2000s and that the future congresswoman introduced him as her brother from London saying he needed “papers,” referring to immigration documents.
Omar was married to first husband Ahmed Hirsi but only by a non-legally binding Muslim ceremony in 2002, which was not recognized by the state. Omar gave birth to her third child with Hirsi while legally married to Elmi. Documents reviewed by The Post show the three adults also appeared to share a residence at one point.
A Hennepin County, Minn., marriage certificate reviewed by The Post shows Omar and Elmi married on February 12, 2009, in Eden Prairie, Minn.
That wedding — held by a Christian minister, despite Omar being Muslim — was legally recognized under US law. After the 2017 divorce, Omar then legally married first husband Hirsi before divorcing him in 2019 and marrying her third husband, campaign staffer named Tim Mynett.