Federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota on Monday, according to three people briefed on the matter, the kind of investigative step the Justice Department has long shied away from so close to an election.
The court-approved search of her Washington-area home comes after Department of Homeland Security officials said in recent months that they were investigating Ms. Omar, a Democrat, over her family’s immigration paperwork. More recently, some federal investigators have also sought to investigate other issues, such as Ms. Omar’s finances, campaign funds and interactions with a foreign citizen, as The New York Times previously reported.
The three people who described the execution of the search warrant spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
The search warrant, executed 22 days before Election Day, lists a series of potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, as well as a general conspiracy charge, according to a person familiar with the document.
In a statement posted on social media on Monday, Ms. Omar called the raid “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,” she wrote, adding: “I will not be silenced.”
President Trump has frequently attacked Ms. Omar, focusing on her Somali heritage. At a political rally on Saturday in Tennessee, he said: “She comes from Somalia, they don’t have a government, they don’t have police. All they have is crime and squalor.”
He added: “These people from Somalia, what they’ve done to Minnesota, should never be allowed and let’s see what happens.”
A Justice Department spokeswoman said that Homeland Security Investigations agents — a part of ICE — executed a judicially authorized search of a home in the Washington area, as part of an “ongoing federal criminal investigation.” The spokeswoman declined to comment further.
In September, Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, said his department was investigating issues surrounding Ms. Omar and her family’s immigration to the United States, and suggested the end result could be deportation.
Ms. Omar was born in Mogadishu in the early 1980s. Her family fled their hometown when she was around 8, as a civil war engulfed Somalia, according to a memoir she wrote. In the mid-1990s, after spending time at a refugee camp in Kenya, Ms. Omar and her relatives were admitted as refugees in the United States. They started a new life in Minnesota, which is home to the largest Somali diaspora in the United States.
Ms. Omar has long said that suggestions that she and her family committed immigration fraud were false and politically motivated.
“I will say it again so it’s as clear as possible: I’m not at all worried about these investigations, because they are complete shams,” she wrote in a fund-raising email in September.
Monday’s search of her home, which was reported earlier by Fox News, takes place within the 60-day window before an election. Justice Department policy has long urged prosecutors not to take any overt, unnecessary investigative steps that could affect an election during that period — especially if such actions could be taken after the election without causing any harm to the investigation. The guiding principle of the 60-day rule is that prosecutors should exercise caution in regard to politically sensitive cases.
The rule is not absolute, and there are exceptions, such as instances where prosecutors believe evidence could be destroyed, ongoing crimes are being committed, or people are in danger. The rule is also largely an interpretation of Justice Department regulations, and as such has been the subject of significant debate about its exact parameters. For many years, however, Justice Department officials have concluded that a publicly observable search — such as of a politician’s home or business — is the kind of overt activity that should be avoided during the 60-day period.
In the last federal election, Mr. Trump cited the 60-day rule in his own criminal cases to accuse the department of acting improperly in 2024 as he campaigned for election. He and his lawyers, some of whom now run the Justice Department, argued that the special counsel, Jack Smith, broke the 60-day rule when he filed court papers in September 2024 describing the evidence supporting charges that Mr. Trump had conspired to obstruct the results of the 2020 election. In that instance, however, the key filing was made in response to a court order, which is not subject to the department policy.
In a statement on Monday, the House Democratic leadership — Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Pete Aguilar of California — condemned the search of Ms. Omar’s house as a “rogue abuse of power.”
“The Trump administration’s raid on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s home is deeply disturbing and raises serious questions about the continued corrupt weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump’s adversaries,” they said.
Ms. Omar has represented a solidly blue district that includes Minneapolis since 2019, and she faced no serious competitors during the primary this year.
Her immigration history has been scrutinized since she first ran for a seat in the State Legislature in 2016 and made history as the state’s first Somali American lawmaker, according to people familiar with the inquiries.
The Justice Department under the Biden administration also opened an investigation into Ms. Omar in 2024 that examined her finances, campaign spending and interactions with a foreign citizen, as The Times previously reported.
Previous federal inquiries — including one seeking to establish whether Ms. Omar married a sibling to get him a green card — ended without any charges. Ms. Omar has called such claims “absurd and offensive.”
Late last year, Tom Homan, the White House border czar told Newsmax that earlier efforts to investigate Ms. Omar’s immigration matters were stymied by statute of limitations.
Investigators were reviewing her immigration files again, Mr. Homan said, adding that he had no doubt Ms. Omar had committed fraud.
In March, Vice President JD Vance reiterated that claim, which he said he had discussed with the White House senior aide Stephen Miller.
“We’re trying to look at what the remedies are,” Mr. Vance told a conservative podcaster. “That’s the thing that we’re trying to figure out is, what are the legal remedies now that we know that she has committed immigration fraud, how do you go after her, how do you investigate her … how do you build a case necessary to get some justice for the American people?”
In recent months, federal investigators opened an investigation into Ms. Omar’s immigration history, focusing in part on whether her late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, lied or omitted information as he sought legal status in the United States before becoming a U.S. citizen.
Among the questions investigators have looked at is whether Ms. Omar derived citizenship from a father who may have been ineligible to obtain naturalized status, according to a person familiar with the case.
If there is conclusive evidence that Ms. Omar derived citizenship improperly, the Justice Department could pursue a criminal or civil denaturalization case against her. In cases in which prosecutors prevail and persuade a federal judge to order someone denaturalized, the immigrant may be placed in deportation proceedings.
Annie Karni contributed reporting.
