Omar Describes 4-5 Hour HSI Search of Her Home, Says She Can't Move Back as DOJ Tells Court Warrant Isn't Fully Executed

Since agents from Homeland Security Investigations searched Rep. Ilhan Omar's Washington home on Oct. 12, the Minnesota Democrat had stayed out of public view. On Wednesday night, Oct. 21, she broke that silence with an MS NOW interview, and a Justice Department court filing shows the investigation is still open.

What Omar says happened

Omar told MS NOW's Chris Hayes that agents began pounding on the front and back doors at about 6 a.m. She had come home from travel hours earlier and had slept about two and a half hours. Her first thought, she said, was that "something was on fire."

Her husband opened the door and she was handed a warrant. Omar said agents also asked her to sign a document waiving protections she has as a member of Congress. She declined. "That was obnoxious," she said.

She estimated that 15 to 25 agents searched the house room by room over four to five hours. Her husband and their 20-year-old son were inside. Omar said she could not reach her attorney until about an hour in.

Agents took 17 items, she said: her phone, an old phone of hers, her youngest daughter's first phone, her husband's notebooks, a camera from the 1960s and a Somali phrase book her husband was using to learn the language. "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.

She did not describe the agents as abusive. She said they "mostly conducted themselves in a decent way" and that they put the house back in order, even folding some clothes.

'Obviously, I can't continue to live there'

Omar said death threats and her publicly available address mean she cannot go back. "Obviously, I can't continue to live there," she said. "So have to figure out where to move to."

She also said her passport, computers and other belongings should be returned.

Omar said the timing, weeks before the midterms, was no accident. "I think ultimately their goal is to intimidate and scare people from wanting to participate and vote," she said. She tied the raid to the administration's Metro Surge operation, its look at voter rolls and the door knocks by federal agents.

She also said the effect has been the opposite. Her staff, she said, are reporting long lines at early voting sites in Minnesota and more requests for rides than they can handle. That is her account. No turnout figures were offered.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

The government's position

The Justice Department has said HSI "executed a judicially authorized search warrant" as "part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation." It has said nothing more on the record about what it is looking for.

A person familiar with the investigation told NBC News that possible charges include conspiracy and making false statements in immigration paperwork. A source told MS NOW the warrant listed immigration fraud, false statements in immigration proceedings and conspiracy. CNN, citing people familiar with the probe, reported that investigators are examining whether Omar or her late father made false statements about her age during the citizenship process.

Omar, who arrived in the U.S. in March 1995 at age 12 and became a naturalized citizen in 2000 at 17, denies wrongdoing. Of the investigators, she said: "The people who knocked on my door, searching for papers, literally have his papers. They are the ones who processed us to come to the United States."

Border czar Tom Homan has said that if the allegations are proven, Omar could be denaturalized.

NBC News reports the investigation has alarmed Justice Department veterans who point to how close it is to the election.

The court filing

In a filing, prosecutors said the warrant for Omar's home has not been fully executed. They asked a judge to postpone any response to requests to unseal the warrant records until it is. Fourteen news organizations filed separate unsealing requests on Oct. 15.

The Justice Department proposed updating the court within 30 days of full execution, followed by further discussion of how to proceed. If the judge rejects that, prosecutors want until Nov. 9 to respond to the news organizations.

The filing also lists Omar as "Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar." Prosecutors did not explain why. The Daily Wire said it has asked the Justice Department about the name and what remains to be done under the warrant.

The New York Times has reported that investigators seized a phone belonging to Omar's sister, Sahra Noor, earlier this year, and that text messages among family members helped persuade a judge to approve the search. Omar's sister and another family member have also received subpoenas, according to the Daily Wire.

Questions that predate the raid

Critics have long pointed to Omar's birth year, which congressional staff changed from 1981 to 1982 in official directories. Under the law at the time, a child needed to be under 18 to derive citizenship through a naturalizing parent, so the year could matter. Omar has not been charged with anything related to it, and the Justice Department has not publicly said what the investigation turns on.

The New York Post reported that a 2023 search for her father's naturalization records came up empty. The Daily Wire reported that her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, served as a colonel in Somalia's military under Siad Barre. Omar has described him as an educator.

Asked about the long-circulating claim that she married her brother, Omar called it "insane" and said it traced to a Somali blog post later picked up by right-wing activists in Minneapolis. Asked whether she was related to her former husband, she said: "Not to my knowledge." The Justice Department has not publicly connected that claim to its investigation.

What comes next

The next marker is the judge's decision on the Justice Department's request to delay. If it is denied, prosecutors face a Nov. 9 deadline to respond to the 14 news organizations. Until the warrant is fully executed and the records are unsealed, the public has only anonymous accounts of what investigators are examining.