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Rep. Ilhan Omar and her husband were at their Washington home Monday morning when federal agents executed a search warrant, taking the Minnesota Democrat’s cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and her passport, according to a new report.
The “Squad” member is the target of separate federal investigations, The Post confirmed Wednesday, with prosecutors in Minnesota probing potential immigration fraud, while the office of DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro is pursuing an inquiry into the finances of Omar and her husband, Tim Mynett.
The Wall Street Journal, citing US officials and others familiar with the Omar case, reported that the ultimate goal of the immigration investigation is to strip the lawmaker of her citizenship and deport her.
Federal immigration law allows authorities to revoke American citizenship if the privilege is found to have been awarded through willful misrepresentation or concealment of material facts. The Trump administration recently moved to denaturalize 40 US citizens accused of crimes ranging from tax fraud to child pornography to spying for China.
The immigration investigation into Omar reportedly focuses on whether she illegally obtained so-called derivative US citizenship through her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, by wrongly claiming to have been a minor at the time the benefit was extended in 2000.
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 19 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.
If Omar is found to have lied about her birthdate on any official form — such as a passport renewal or bank loan application — she could be prosecuted, given naturalization fraud has a 10-year statute of limitations. There is no statute of limitations on civil denaturalization cases.
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.”