Rep. Ilhan Omar says the raid on her Washington home has cost her the home: with her address now public and death threats coming in, she told MS NOW she must move her family somewhere her children cannot be tracked.
Omar made the remarks to Chris Hayes on Wednesday in her first interview since Homeland Security Investigations agents searched her Washington, D.C., home on October 12. "Obviously, I can't continue to live there," she said. "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."
By Omar's account, she had slept only about two and a half hours after returning from a trip before agents woke her at 6 a.m., pounding on the door. A team of HSI agents presented a search warrant — one that, she noted, allowed them to come any time between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. "You don't show up to somebody's house that early in the morning unless you're trying to freak them out," she said. "And you know it obviously did freak all of us out." She said agents asked her to sign away her constitutional protections as a member of Congress; she refused, calling the request "obnoxious." The search then went room by room for four to five hours. Omar conceded the agents "mostly decently conducted themselves" — they even folded some of her clothes back up.
What they left with was 17 items: her phone, an older travel phone, her youngest daughter's first phone, her husband's notebooks — about ten of the 17 items — a vintage camera that was a gift from his uncle, and a children's Somali phrase book. "To walk away with 17 items of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones was such a bizarre, bizarre thing," she said.
"Obviously, I can't continue to 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." — Rep. Ilhan Omar
The search is part of a federal investigation built on a judicially authorized warrant listing potential immigration fraud, false statements and conspiracy. People familiar with the probe have told CNN that investigators are examining whether Omar or her late father gave false information about her age on her path to citizenship. Omar arrived in the United States in March 1995, aged 12, after fleeing Somalia's civil war and spending four years in a Kenyan refugee camp, and was naturalized in 2000. She has questioned how a 12-year-old could have conspired to mislead officials. In the same interview, asked about the claim that she married her brother, she answered "Not to my knowledge" and called the allegation "insane," saying it began on a Somali blog before spreading among conspiracy theorists in Minneapolis. No charges against her have been announced.
Omar calls the raid political intimidation. "Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement," she wrote on X after the search. "I will not be silenced." To Hayes she added: "I'm confident in my truth. I'm confident in the fact that I didn't do anything wrong." The administration is not backing down. Asked at the White House on Tuesday whether Omar could face deportation over alleged misstatements in her paperwork, President Trump — prefacing that it was his opinion — called her "a sick, very dishonest person who hates our country" and said, "Well, she could be. She could also go to jail." Border czar Tom Homan has made the legal case plainly: "If you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody. We've done it before." For now, the investigation continues — and Omar is house-hunting.