Ilhan Omar home raid, Haines attack: Inside rise in violence on officials

United States Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been forced to move out of her Washington, DC residence because of safety concerns after her home was raided, amid growing threats of violence against politicians.

Last week, US federal agents searched Omar’s home with what a Justice Department spokesperson described as a “judicially authorised search warrant”, adding that the raid was part of an “ongoing federal criminal investigation”.

According to NBC News, which cited one person familiar with the matter, charges against Omar may include conspiracy and making false statements in her immigration paperwork.

For years, Somalia-born Omar, who is Muslim, has been the target of right-wing conspiracy theories about her immigration status, including allegations that he had married her brother.

The Minnesota congresswoman has repeatedly denied the allegations as “disgusting lies”.

She has drawn the particular ire of US President Donald Trump, who views her as a thorn in his side and has threatened to deport her.

Omar came to the US in 1995 at age 12 and was naturalised as a US citizen in 2000. Since January 2019, she has served as a congressional representative for the state of Minnesota.

But on Wednesday, she told the US news outlet MS NOW that following the raid on her Washington apartment, she could no longer live there.

“Because our address has been public and with the death threats that I deal with, it’s no longer going to be feasible to be in that house and have my kids visiting off and on, having people track them,” she said.

The raid on Omar’s home comes as violent attacks on politicians have grown more frequent.

She, herself, has been physically assaulted. In January this year, Omar was sprayed with an unknown substance by an assailant while calling for the abolition of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency at a town hall meeting in Minneapolis.

On Monday this week, Australian independent MP Helen Haines, who has championed climate action and advocated for improved working conditions as a lawmaker, was hit by a car outside her electorate office, resulting in the amputation of both of her legs.

Australian police said it was a “targeted attack” and warned of growing “online extremism” and recorded a rise in abuse, threats and intimidation targeting lawmakers.

‘Dangerous escalation’

The violent attack on Haines was particularly shocking. Her attacker, identified as Brendan Nugent, 43, allegedly drove past her before turning his car around and veering towards Haines, pinning her against her car.

Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the driver then reversed before ramming her again.

Sofia Collignon, a reader in comparative politics and director of the Mile End Institute of Research at Queen Mary University London, said instances of physical violence, such as the attack on Haines, are still “relatively rare in terms of numbers”.

“It’s very upsetting to see that more and more people in public life are paying a very high price for doing something that is a public good,” Collignon told Al Jazeera.

Abuse online often comes before physical attacks, however.

She said that women – and, in particular, women of colour in politics – are facing high levels of abuse on social media, and this is taking a worrying toll.

“We are seeing from research that this is having an effect on how they [women] behave in politics, or whether they change the way that they campaign, change the type of issues that they advocate or sometimes completely refrain from participating on social media,” she said.

According to a 2023 report by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), which assessed 12 years of data on attacks against Italian politicians, “marginally elected women are approximately three times more likely to experience an attack” than marginally elected men.

The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs Bridging the Gap initiative, which tracks political violence in the US, found that there has been a “dangerous escalation in the political violence risk environment in the US, including a series of high-profile assassinations and aggressive federal immigration operations”, in 2025

“Incidents of threats and harassment spiked, and leading community safety practitioners reported that the demand for de-escalation support surged to new heights,” it added.

In the case of Omar, Trump has repeatedly targeted the congresswoman since his first term of office over her Somali origins.

He has called her a “sick person”, an “extremist”, and “garbage”, among other inflammatory language.

Other Muslim or progressive congresswomen have also been subjected to Trump’s rhetoric. In February, he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform that Omar and Palestinian American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib should be sent “back from where they came from”.

But Trump himself has also contended with political violence. In 2024, during his campaign rally, Trump was shot in the ear by a spectator attending the rally.

Then, Trump ally Charlie Kirk was killed in 2025 by a man named Tyler Robinson, who said he had carried out the attack because he had “enough of his [Kirk’s] hatred”.

‘Fierce political polarisation’ to blame

Online threats of attacks on politicians have led to real-life killings for some time.

In 2016, British MP Jo Cox was killed in her constituency while campaigning to remain in the European Union ahead of the referendum by a man named Thomas Mair, who had shouted: “This is for Britain.”

In 2021, Conservative British MP David Amess was killed by a man named Ali Harbi Ali, who claimed that he had targeted the representative over his vote for air strikes on Syria.

In 2026, former Conservative MP and spokesperson for the far-right Reform UK party, Ann Widdecombe, was killed by a man named Joshua Kerry, who has been charged with engaging in conduct in preparation for “acts of terrorism”, including against Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.

Collignon said she believes social media has “lowered the bar” for bad-faith actors to threaten politicians, which explains the increase in the volume of threats.

“For example, what people consider to be acceptable ways of referring to politicians or to talk to them are more and more aggressive. They can find it acceptable to use more aggressive terms, partly because of the polarisation in politics,” she said.

“It’s not an issue that we observed only on the right or on the left, but we observe it very often on the fringes of the spectrum. They find that it is acceptable to use unacceptable language or behaviour in the pursuit of their political goals. So that means intimidating a politician is something that they kind of condone.”

According to an Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) 2026 annual report, local officials faced a “persistent and evolving threat of violence in 2025” in an analysis of 2,653 incidents of violence that targeted local officials globally.

The data show that the recorded incidents worldwide have spread from 88 countries and territories in 2025 to 97 in 2024.

“Over the past five years, ACLED records at least 13,900 incidents in 138 countries and territories,” said the report. “Local officials often become lightning rods for broader societal grievances. Large-scale protest movements in recent years have directed their frustration and anger at local authorities, viewed as the nerve endings of a failing or corrupt state.

“Especially in Europe and the United States, a pernicious mix of fierce political polarisation and unchecked competition for political dominance exposes politicians, and especially local elected officials, to a growing trend of harassment, abuse and violence.”

Moreover, a 2026 report by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a global international organisation of national parliaments, revealed that of the 519 parliamentarians who participated in research across five national case studies and joined a global survey, 71 percent of all respondents reported having “experienced violence by the public, whether online, offline or both”.

“Violence is heavily concentrated online, with between 65 percent and 77 percent of MPs across the case studies reporting online abuse,” it found. 

However, Collignon said the line between online threats of violence and being physically assaulted has become increasingly blurred.

“Let’s say that I check my social media accounts at home, a place where I should feel safe,” she said. “But then, if my phone is showing me constant abuse, threats of violence, very nasty behaviour, then I am receiving all of these attacks in my living room.

“We currently are operating in a space where lines are blurry, and I think we shouldn’t be thinking about online violence as something that just happens in the digital sphere. It’s something that has consequences for the individual in their daily lives, and the way in which they are involved in politics.”