The Trump regime's investigation of Ilhan Omar is meant to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and deport her, U.S. officials and people familiar with the case told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. Two days after Homeland Security Investigations agents searched her Washington home before dawn and left with her phone, the purpose of the search is no longer something the reader has to infer. The aim is to remove an elected member of Congress from the country.
The case is built on her dead father. Nur Omar Mohamed brought Omar and other relatives to the United States from a refugee camp in Kenya in 1995 and filled in her immigration papers. She became a citizen through his naturalisation in 2000, at 17, and has said so for years: "I became a citizen actually before I turned 18." Investigators are now examining whether her birth date was misstated so that she qualified as a minor. The theory is seven years old. A failed Republican congressional candidate, A.J. Kern, pushed it in 2019 after Omar's staff asked a Minnesota legislative library to correct her birth year from 1981 to 1982, and Homeland Security Investigations looked at it then and did not proceed. Her father died five years ago and cannot answer for his paperwork.
What has changed is not the evidence but the people in charge. Prosecutors in the office of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minneapolis reopened the file last year. Roughly a dozen grand jury subpoenas went out on Friday, most of them to Omar's relatives, including her sister Sahra Noor. The subpoenas also revive the claim that her ex-husband was her brother, which no agency has ever substantiated. On Tuesday the D.C. U.S. Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, went on Fox News to announce that her office is investigating Omar's financial disclosures as well, a matter the House's own ethics office had already recommended dismissing. Three offices of the Justice Department are now working on one congresswoman, 20 days before her election.
The judge who signed the warrant did not trust them with what they would take. Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh told prosecutors before approving the search that they could not simply walk off with everything in a member of Congress's house, and made them set up a screening process to keep her legislative work away from investigators under the Speech or Debate Clause. The Justice Department had argued for weeks that it should have broad access to the records in her home and that there was little need to set any of them aside.
Trump was asked on Tuesday whether he wants Omar deported. "I don't take a position," he said, and then took one. "I think she's a terrible person. I don't think she loves our country at all." He has said what he wants many times. In November he said she should be thrown out of the country and called on the government to "denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility". In February he said she and Rashida Tlaib should be "sent back". At a rally in Youngstown on Monday night, hours after his agents had been through her house, he said she "comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military, where all they do is shoot each other", and on Tuesday he asked on Truth Social how many people "she illegally bring into our Country from Somalia". JD Vance said in March that Omar had "definitely committed immigration fraud" and that he had discussed with Stephen Miller how to "go after" her. This week he said he had no advance notice of the search.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last month that "something's going to happen" and that "if we actually move a case forward, it's not a political case." Rep. Nancy Mace said that if fraud is proven Omar "should be denaturalized and deported home to Somalia". The regime's people have been describing the end of this case since before it had any evidence, and the Journal's sources have now confirmed that the end is the point.
Her citizenship can only be taken by a federal judge. A criminal denaturalisation case has a ten-year limit and expired in 2010. A civil case has no limit, but the government must prove with "clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence" that she obtained citizenship illegally or by wilfully lying about something that mattered, and the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2017 that the lie has to have made the difference. Even if she lost, she would hold a green card until a separate court ordered her removed. None of that has stopped the regime from making denaturalisation a Justice Department priority in June 2025, filing cases against at least 108 people this year where the average from 1990 to 2017 was eleven, and setting itself a target of 250 by this month. Omar is the one on the list with a seat in Congress.
She has been a citizen for 26 years and a member of Congress for eight. The regime's answer to that is to find out whether a refugee who is now dead got a date wrong in 1995, and to deport his daughter if he did.
