Seven years ago, a political appointee in the first Trump administration approached U.S. immigration authorities with a request that alarmed career staffers: Scrub the immigration records of Rep. Ilhan Omar, then a newly elected Democratic lawmaker from Minnesota, for evidence of fraud.
That 2019 demand, detailed by three former immigration officials, struck staffers at the time as a highly unusual effort to wield federal power to dig up compromising material on a sitting member of Congress who was a prominent critic of President Donald Trump.
The request sparked a swift review examining Omar’s history, her family’s past as Somali refugees resettled in the United States and rumors that had circulated for years in conservative media over her marriage.
Homeland Security Investigations – the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ultimately determined there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing, one of the former officials said. The idea of pursuing a full investigation was eventually abandoned.
Now, though, with Trump back in the White House and his administration using federal power to take aim at perceived enemies, Omar has once again found herself in federal crosshairs. She is now facing an inquiry over some of the same allegations investigators previously deemed not worth pursuing.
The current effort – which burst into public view Monday as federal agents descended upon Omar’s D.C. home – is focused on whether she or her father lied on paperwork they submitted to obtain legal status and eventual citizenship after arriving in the U.S. in the 1990s.
Investigators are reexamining questions about Omar’s birthdate and her late father’s past military history in Somalia, which had passed scrutiny during the 2019 review. Depending on their findings, the administration could seek to charge Omar with a crime or move to challenge her status in the country.
But such a step would be a sharp reversal of the earlier review, which found no issue with her naturalization, one of the former officials familiar with the earlier effort said.
“I think her citizenship is solid and there wasn’t any fraud there,” the ex-official said.
Omar has dismissed the revived investigation as yet another example of the Justice Department, under Trump, attempting “to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”
“Trump has spread lie after lie about the Congresswoman in a desperate attempt to justify his extraordinary abuse of power,” her spokesperson said in a statement Thursday. “This is politically motivated and an escalation of Trump’s personal vendetta against her lasting over a decade.”
This account of the Trump administration’s current and past efforts to investigate and possibly build a case against Omar is based on interviews with a dozen people, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic details of those probes.
Several current and former officials raised questions about the scope, tactics and motivations driving the current Omar investigation, which they say appears to be disregarding key norms on how immigration reviews are typically handled and bypassing guardrails intended to ensure federal inquiries, including those looking into sitting lawmakers, are not perceived to be driven by politics.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department said the agency does not comment on ongoing investigations. The Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the Justice Department.
Questions about the probe came into play ahead of this week’s highly public search of Omar’s home.
Before carrying out the search, prosecutors spent days working to allay concerns from a federal judge that their plans could run afoul of constitutional protections shielding members of Congress from unwarranted executive branch intrusion, according to three people familiar with the matter.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew J. Sharbaugh, who ultimately signed off on the warrant, first imposed strict conditions on how the search should be carried out, the people said.
His limits on the search appeared intended to ensure that the warrant fell in line with the D.C. court’s interpretation of the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which generally shields lawmakers’ legislative duties and actions from criminal probes. As part of the search, agents removed boxes of documents and seized Omar’s cellphone and passport, one person familiar with the matter said.
Trump has assailed Omar for years, and this week condemned her again on social media and public remarks.
“I think she’s a terrible person,” he told reporters. “But that’s really up to the DOJ. I have nothing to do with it.”
Trump’s administration has also made clear its scrutiny on Omar is not limited to immigration issues.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in D.C., announced Tuesday her office had launched its own investigation into Omar’s personal finances, tied to disclosure statements she filed in Congress last year and separate from the immigration probe.
Pirro, a former Fox News host, once drew a highly unusual public rebuke from the network in 2019 for on-air comments suggesting that Omar, as a Muslim, could not be loyal to the U.S. Constitution.
Omar’s office has previously dismissed questions raised by House Republicans over her financial disclosure statements as a right-wing attempt to “manufacture controversy.”
However, federal prosecutors’ interest in the finances of Omar extend back to the Biden administration, according to two people familiar with the effort. Those individuals said it was not clear why the investigation during the prior administration appeared to have stalled.
But the revived immigration investigation into Omar appears to be the furthest along and the administration’s higher priority.
Alessandra P. Serano, an associate deputy attorney general who is playing a key role in the probe, went before the judge seeking the search warrant for Omar’s home, two people familiar with the matter said. Attorney General Todd Blanche also recently dispatched Serano, a trusted aide, to Florida to check in on the high-profile and struggling Florida-based investigation into former Obama and Biden-era officials, according to multiple people.
Authorities have issued more than a dozen subpoenas related to Omar and the investigation into her, including some to her siblings, seeking testimony before a grand jury in Minneapolis in the coming weeks, two people said.
The Washington Post has reported that investigators are focused on whether Omar or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, intentionally misstated her birth date on immigration paperwork so she could be eligible to derive citizenship through him as a minor when he was naturalized in 2000.
Investigators are also scrutinizing whether Omar’s father may have purposefully lied or omitted information on his past military service in Somalia that could have made him ineligible to obtain legal status in the country.
But three former officials involved in the 2019 review of Omar’s immigration file said both of those issues were considered during that inquiry.
An official with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who was normally tasked with scrutinizing the backgrounds of people including serious criminals, terrorists and potential national security threats, was asked in 2019 to review Omar’s background. The then-freshman lawmaker had emerged as a frequent focus of conservative attacks.
At the time, the agency was primarily focused on possible fraud related to Omar’s marriage to her former husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. Right-wing commentators had repeatedly pressed unsubstantiated claims that Omar and Elmi were siblings who carried out a sham marriage so that Elmi could obtain U.S. immigration benefits.
Elmi had previously filed an immigration petition related to his marriage-based green card that would move it from conditional status to permanent. USCIS requested additional evidence due to concerns over the validity of his marriage, but Elmi withdrew the application following that request, one of the former officials said. Elmi could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.
The 2019 review of Omar also looked at other issues, some of which are being examined anew.
For instance, back then, USCIS quickly determined it could not accurately answer questions over Omar’s age because refugees frequently come from countries with little or no birth records, making it hard to determine with any certainty.
“That’s not strange and that’s not a red flag to me,” one of the former officials said. “It’s just very, very common that there aren’t great birth records.”
The agency also examined Omar’s father’s immigration file but did not find any issues, according to the former official.
The USCIS officer tasked with vetting Omar produced a one-page memo of those findings and shared it with a senior USCIS official and a fraud detention official before the effort was ultimately abandoned, the person said. Due to the sensitivity, the memo was printed out, and distributed in person, and not shared over email.
Whether the current investigation will uncover more substantial evidence to back the administration’s fraud claims remains to be seen. Even if the Trump administration finds wrongdoing, any attempt to strip her citizenship would likely be lengthy and result in a legal battle.
The administration, however, is also exploring the possibility that it could seek to revoke her citizenship certificate if the current investigation does not result in criminal charges or a conviction, a senior Trump administration official said.
Revocation is a rarely employed USCIS administrative process that can be used to cancel the document due to fraud or an error. The process is not restricted to a certain period of time like criminal denaturalizations, which are subject to a 10-year statute of limitations.
The revocation would not remove her citizenship but would make it challenging to obtain some government documents. This action could open the door to immigration-related charges and possibly removal proceedings, though such a novel application of the administrative authority would almost certainly face challenges from Omar in court.
In a statement, Omar’s spokesperson assailed the Trump administration’s efforts to target the congresswoman.
“He has lied about her family, about her immigration history, and about her love of this country,” the statement read. “But the truth is that Trump’s push to strip her of her citizenship and deport her has no basis in the law and has no precedent. This isn’t a legitimate law enforcement action.”
Alexei Koseff contributed to this report.
Related Content
