Rep. Ilhan Omar has spoken publicly for the first time since federal agents raided her Washington home, saying’s Chris Hayes that she cannot continue living at the residence after her address was exposed during the search.
The Minnesota Democrat, 42, described the April 21 raid by Homeland Security Investigations agents as “intrusive but polite,” noting that officers went “room by room” and seized 17 items including her cellphones, her daughter’s old cellphone, her husband’s notebooks, a Somali phrase book and a camera. “I thought something was on fire,” she said of her initial reaction to the banging on her door. “I thought something was happening to the neighbors. It sounded like an urgent evacuation sort of situation.”
Omar praised the agents for their tidiness after the search was complete. “They did a really good job in putting everything back in its place,” she said. “They actually even folded some of my clothing that were not folded.” She refuted reports that investigators collected her DNA during the raid, stating, “I would have seen if they did take anything that had contained DNA.”
The congresswoman indicated she must relocate due to security concerns now that her address is public knowledge. “I can’t continue to live there, so we have to figure out where to move to,” she told Hayes. “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 like visiting off and on, having people track them.”
During the interview, which aired Wednesday, Omar addressed decade-old allegations that she married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, in a purported immigration scheme. The claims originated on a Somali blog and were amplified by “right-wing conspiracy theorists,” she said. When Hayes asked if there was any “weird kernel of truth” to the brother-marriage allegation, Omar responded, “Not to my knowledge,” She added that bloggers “went and like found random people who are like.. ‘She introduced him to us and said he was her brother,’ which is, you know, insane.”
Omar also pushed back against financial disclosure documents suggesting she and her husband, Tim Mynett, had a combined net worth of approximately $30 million, a figure she later revised downward, calling it a mistake. “I have a Toyota Camry that’s from 2016. It’s our only car. I rent my DC place and my Minneapolis place, and so I mean, I don’t know, that sounds like not the majority of Congress, but there’s some of us that don’t come from wealth and don’t have wealth,” she said.
The HSI raid is part of a broader investigation being led by the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office into possible immigration fraud, with more than a dozen federal grand jury subpoenas issued, including to Omar’s relatives, according to the Wall Street Journal. The probe may involve possible false statements on immigration documents about Omar’s birth date, sources familiar with the case said. A separate financial investigation involving Omar and Mynett is being run out of the Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney’s Office.
President Trump has publicly speculated about Omar facing imprisonment if immigration fraud is proven. “She could go to jail,” he said Tuesday. “They keep talking about deportation.” Sources have indicated the administration could seek to denaturalize and deport Omar if her citizenship was procured through concealment of material facts or willful misrepresentation by herself or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, who became a naturalized citizen in 2000.
Omar, who maintains she became a citizen at age 17 through her father, has denied all wrongdoing. “I’m confident in my truth. I’m confident in the fact that I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told Hayes. “I do feel confident that when it’s all said and done that I’m going to be just fine.”
In a minute-long video filmed in the back of a moving vehicle and posted on social media, her first on-camera remarks since the raid, Omar framed the investigation as political intimidation. She urged supporters to donate to her re-election campaign so she could “fight Trump and his administration for trying to intimidate me and so many other people right before the midterm elections.” She accused the president of “running scared.”
Omar has represented Minnesota’s 5th congressional district since 2019 and is a prominent member of the progressive “Squad.”
