Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota said the federal agents who searched her Washington home before dawn this month were trying to frighten her family, and she called the longstanding claim that she once married her brother “insane” in her first television interview since the raid.
But when MS NOW host Chris Hayes asked whether she was related to her former husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, at all, Omar answered, “Not to my knowledge.”
The interview aired Wednesday, the same day a federal court record in a fight over the sealed search warrant listed the congresswoman as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar,” according to reports on the filing. Prosecutors have not publicly explained why they used that name. Fourteen news organizations, including The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post and CNN, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Oct. 15 to unseal the warrant and its supporting affidavits. The New York Times filed a separate request.
Agents with Homeland Security Investigations searched the home Oct. 12, three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections in which Omar is seeking a fifth term. The Justice Department has said only that the search was part of “an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” A person familiar with the probe told Reuters it involves alleged immigration fraud, including paperwork her late father completed when she was a child. Federal authorities have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to some of her relatives, according to a person briefed on the investigation.
Omar denies any wrongdoing and calls the investigation political retaliation by President Donald Trump.
‘They came pounding on the doors’
Omar told Hayes the agents arrived at 6 a.m., only hours after she had returned home from a trip.
“Well, I mean, you don’t show up to somebody’s house that early in the morning unless you’re trying to freak them out,” Omar said. “And it obviously did freak all of us out. I only had two and a half hours of sleep when they came pounding on the doors.”
“I’d been traveling, so I got in like 1:30, 2:00. I think I went to bed like 3:00, 3:30,” she said. “And so it was, you know, trying to figure out like if you’re dreaming this weird thing that’s happening, but they basically like surrounded the house. They were pounding on the back door and the front door.”
A neighbor, Sharon Jackson, 79, said agents woke her around 4:30 a.m.
Omar said her family rushed from their upstairs bedrooms. “We were screaming, we were coming down,” she said, describing the household “trying to put on clothes and, you know, trying to run down before they broke the door.”
The agents were shouting, she said, “but it was unclear to us when we were upstairs.”
“I thought something was on fire. I thought something was happening to the neighbors. Like, it sounded like an urgent evacuation sort of situation,” Omar said. “Again, like I said, I only had, you know, maybe two, two and a half hours to sleep. And so it took us a while to figure out what was actually happening, even after we opened the door.”
Omar said her husband, Tim Mynett, and her 20-year-old son were home. Her daughter was not.
Mynett opened the door, Omar said, and she recognized the agents as being from HSI, “which I’m familiar with. So I figured that they were there for a purpose. And so I did ask if they had a search warrant. And they provided me a search warrant.”
Asked whether seeing the agency’s name made the purpose clear, she said it did not. “Again, even my eyes couldn’t adjust to the warrant and the HSI because that’s immigration, that’s trafficking, that’s drugs,” she said. “The fact that they were at my house that early in the morning was so bizarre. So I was like, ‘Why are you here?'”
As a member of Congress, Omar is protected by the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, which shields lawmakers’ legislative work from executive branch scrutiny. Hayes, citing a letter from Omar’s lawyers to the Justice Department, said the magistrate judge who approved the warrant required agents to tell her about that protection.
Omar said agents instead handed her “two papers that were attached together that essentially said they wanted me to sign a waiver.”
“That was obnoxious,” she said, laughing. “I just couldn’t understand why they would think that I would sign such a thing.” She said she did not sign it.
She estimated that “somewhere between 15 to 25 agents” came and went during the search. “There were a few that were in and then out, and then a few more in, a few more out,” she said, adding, “I think they mostly conducted themselves in a decent way.”
Phones, notebooks and a Somali phrase book
“They went room by room. And they took 17 items,” Omar said.
Several were phones. “Yeah, they took my phone, an old phone, I believe, that was a travel phone of mine,” she said. “My youngest daughter’s first phone that was also old, sitting in her room. And then a phone that I’d just gotten replaced that was still in my possession.”
Agents also took a camera Mynett received from his uncle as a graduation gift, Omar said. “I think it’s from the ’60s. He was in the Navy, and he’d used it to document his life while he was stationed abroad. They took that.”
They took a Somali phrase book, too. “Somebody gifted my husband a book that helps people learn Somali,” she said. Asked how his Somali was coming along, she said, “It’s getting better day by day, yeah. I think he knows the basics, so I don’t think we could say anything mean while he’s around.”
“And then they took his notebooks,” she said.
The search lasted “hours, four to five hours,” Omar said. “I was surprised when they handed me the receipt for the items that they’d taken to do that long of a search and to walk away with 17 items of like 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones,” she said. “It’s such a bizarre, bizarre thing.”
Hayes said Omar’s lawyers contend the warrant also required agents to notify the House general counsel, which the lawyers say did not happen, and to let Omar contact an attorney when the search began.
“I don’t think I was able to call my attorney until about an hour into the search,” Omar said. “I sat on the couch, staring at the warrant, trying to make sure that they were staying within the bounds of what the warrant allowed them to do.”
In an Oct. 16 letter, Omar’s attorneys demanded the return of the seized property, calling the search “neither justified nor lawful” and the probe a “vindictive, retributive, and politically motivated criminal investigation.” A Justice Department spokesperson said the letter was “riddled with false allegations and inaccuracies.” Spokesperson Emily Covington said, “Our attorneys and law enforcement partners complied with all court orders and legal obligations, as they always do.”
Omar said she still does not know what investigators are after. “No, I don’t think anybody still has an understanding of what is happening,” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t make any sense that they would raid a house to take my phone, because essentially that’s kind of the warrant was for like electronics. And so to come that early to take my phone just sounded obnoxious. It still sounds obnoxious.”
She denied reports that agents collected her DNA. Asked whether they took a toothbrush or a comb, she said, “None of that was listed. ‘Cause they have to give you a receipt of the items that are seized. So I would have seen if they did take anything that had contained DNA.”
After the agents left, she said, “I just went back around the house, just trying to make sure everything was put back. They did a really good job in putting everything back in its place. They actually even folded some of my clothing that were not folded.”
When Hayes summed up the search as “intrusive but polite,” Omar agreed. “Intrusive but polite,” she said. “And yeah, they left the house, I think, in good shape.”
‘Not to my knowledge’
Omar legally married Elmi, a British citizen, in 2009. The relationship ended in 2011, and she sought a legal divorce in 2017. Since 2016, conservative websites have claimed Elmi is her brother and that the marriage was meant to help him immigrate. Omar has called the claim “absurd and offensive” and “disgusting lies,” and fact-checkers have found no credible evidence the two are siblings. Trump has repeated it, telling a Florida audience in May, “I believe she married her brother, which is totally illegal.”
Asked when and why the claim began, Omar said, “It started with the Somali blog that I don’t know if it still exists, but somebody put in there that he had to have been my brother or something to that effect.”
“And right-wing conspiracy theorists in Minneapolis got a hold of it, and they just kind of went and found random people who were like, she introduced us, she introduced him to us, and said he was her brother, which is insane,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know those people that they talk about.”
“You were not related to him at all,” Hayes said.
“Not that I, not to my knowledge,” Omar replied.
When Hayes asked whether some kernel of truth might have been distorted over time, she again said, “Not to my knowledge.”
NewsNation, citing unnamed sources, has reported that DNA evidence is critical to the investigation. Officials have not publicly confirmed that. Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, and at least one other relative have been subpoenaed, The New York Times reported.
Hayes said the focus of the case now appears to be what Omar’s father told immigration officials about her when he became a citizen.
“So convenient,” Omar said, “convenient because my dad is no longer alive.” She added, “So, it’s another thing they can drag on forever.”
“Like the people who knocked on my door searching for papers literally have his papers,” she said. “They are the ones who processed us to come to the United States. And they have all of that.”
Omar’s family fled Somalia’s civil war when she was 8, spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, and arrived in the U.S. in the 1990s. Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, became a citizen in 2000, and Omar derived citizenship through him at 17. He died in 2020. The Washington Post reported that investigators are examining whether he or Omar misstated her birthdate so she would qualify as a minor, and are also looking at his past military service in Somalia.
The Post also reported that during Trump’s first term, a political appointee asked immigration authorities to scour Omar’s records for fraud. A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer, focused largely on her marriage to Elmi, reviewed her file and her father’s and wrote a one-page memo that found no problems, the Post reported. “I think her citizenship is solid and there wasn’t any fraud there,” a former official told the newspaper.
Trump has said the current investigation “has nothing to do with me.” Omar disagreed.
“Oh, absolutely not. I mean, he’s got everything to do with it,” she said. “You know, this goes back to 2019 when he was screaming about the fact that, you know, I need to be sent back, I need to be deported, which then he ordered his Department of Homeland Security to investigate me. And in that investigation, they produced a one-page memo saying, you know, ‘Her citizenship is solid. There’s nothing for us to look at.'”
“And at that time, they even looked at my father because he was still alive,” she said. “And so for them to say that my status as a citizen in this country was solid, and then to have that same department now saying there’s something wrong, tells you how political this whole investigation is.”
Omar said she learned of that review only recently. “I only saw it in the Washington Post reporting a couple of days ago,” she said. “I did hear that they opened, that there was an opening of my immigration file. But I didn’t know to the extent of what the opening of my investigation meant and who opened it.”
Asked how seriously she takes the possibility of prosecution or of losing her citizenship, Omar said, “Oh, I take it very seriously, and I’m sure my lawyers are taking it very seriously.”
“And, you know, it would be a huge undertaking to, I suppose, indict, you know, a 12-year-old for being so cleverly, you know, conspiring to, you know, to defraud immigration services to come to the United States,” she said. “It’s such a, I don’t know. I’m sure there are a lot of smart 12-year-olds, but that seems like a leap.”
White House border czar Tom Homan has said Omar could face denaturalization if immigration fraud is proven.
‘They made this huge promise’
The search came less than a month before Election Day. The Justice Department has traditionally avoided overt investigative steps involving candidates within about 60 days of an election, though the practice is not legally binding.
Hayes cited CBS News reporting that HSI agents have been knocking on immigrants’ doors and asking whether they are registered to vote. The Department of Homeland Security has expanded HSI voter fraud investigations ahead of the midterms, ABC News reported in September. A DHS spokesperson told ABC that HSI is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.” ABC noted that a Heritage Foundation database lists only about 100 cases of noncitizen voter fraud from 1982 to 2025.
Omar said her case fits the same pattern. “Yeah, I mean, I believe they’ve made this, and you and I have talked about this, they’ve done this sort of full press where they kept alluding to the fact that something was going to happen to me,” she said.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last month that “something’s going to happen” in the case.
“And I think a lot of their right wing influencers who seem to have direct connection to not just the president, but his orbit, I think they were, like, starting to lose faith that these were empty promises and they had to do something, I believe, to say, ‘Hey, look, we raided her house. You know, now you can feel comfortable that we are doing something,'” Omar said.
She tied the search to Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration crackdown in Minneapolis that ended in February, and to the administration’s review of voter rolls.
“Whether it is the voter rolls that they’re looking at, whether it’s the door knocks that you just spoke of, that is all to show these people that they’re doing something and to save face, because they made this huge promise, that there was somehow this massive illegals that were, you know, sort of like undocumented people that were voting in American elections, and that there is something that they need to go and fix,” she said.
“And I think, ultimately, their goal is to intimidate and, like, scare people from wanting to participate and vote,” Omar said.
She said the effort was backfiring. “As I was driving up here today, we were getting calls that people, you know, are just like, there’s a massive line at early voting sites,” she said. “And a lot of our staff that are, you know, helping people drive to go vote are saying, you know, we just we don’t have the capacity to keep up with the requests that we’re getting of people who need assistance to get to the early voting site. And I think it’s doing the opposite.”
In a March podcast interview, Vice President JD Vance said, without offering evidence, “we actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud.” Omar’s office called the claim fabricated and defamatory.
“Which is also interesting in itself, because they are now saying, you know, this is the beginning of the investigation,” Omar said. “So if you had so confidently said, ‘I’ve committed a crime,’ why are you now saying this is the beginning? We’re gonna subpoena people, we’re gonna do a grand jury, we’re gonna try to find evidence that will lead to an indictment. It’s just, it’s all bizarre.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, led by Jeanine Pirro, obtained the warrant and has said “there are several investigations going on” involving Omar, including one into her financial disclosures. In 2019, as a Fox News host, Pirro said, “Think about it: Omar wears a hijab,” and asked whether “her adherence to this Islamic doctrine” was “indicative of her adherence to Sharia law.” Fox News said at the time that it strongly condemned the remarks.
“And how more obvious could these people be?” Omar said. “You know, it’s like there is, you could at least have the appearance of not having this be fictitious, not having this be directed by the president and everybody in his administration who hates me.”
“But they’ve chosen to blatantly have every character that has been involved be someone who has expressed explicitly that they don’t want me to be in the United States and … they don’t want me to be in Congress,” she said, naming Mullin, Vance, Trump and Pirro.
After the search, Katie Miller, a podcaster married to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, posted “Promise made, promise kept” on X in reply to a news story about the raid, then deleted it, The Daily Beast reported.
Asked what she thought Miller meant, Omar said, “She meant exactly what she meant, that they did make this promise to get me, and that they are keeping that promise to get me.”
Trump has said he has “nothing to do” with the investigation. “I’ve always found her to be totally crooked personally, but that has nothing to do with me,” he told reporters the day of the search. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ.” On Tuesday, he said Omar “could go to jail” and that officials “keep talking about deportation,” The New York Post reported.
‘Paycheck to paycheck’
Trump has also accused Omar of amassing great wealth. Her 2025 financial disclosure valued assets held with Mynett at $6 million to $30 million, much of it tied to his firms. She later amended the range to $18,004 to $95,000, citing accounting errors. The Office of Congressional Conduct board voted 5 to 1 to recommend that the House Ethics Committee dismiss allegations that she filed false information, according to TMZ.
When Hayes noted the gap between the two figures, Omar said of her husband’s businesses, “He’s not in them anymore.”
Asked about her finances, Omar said, “I mean, it’s, you know, working, working class, I guess, like paycheck to paycheck still. You know, we’ve got four kids. And you know, we live, I think, like a basic life. 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 if that sounds like, you know, not majority of Congress, but there’s some of us that are, that don’t come from wealth and don’t have wealth,” she said.
Asked whether that is a big divide in Congress, she said, “It is. Yeah, ’cause you have like the millionaires and then you have those of us, you know, when we first went to Congress, had to borrow money to find a place to sleep.”
Omar said the family will have to leave the Washington home.
“Yeah, I mean, obviously I can’t continue to live there,” she said. “So we have to figure out where to move to 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, like, visiting off and on and having people track them.”
In January, a man sprayed Omar with a liquid at a Minneapolis town hall. A lab later identified it as water and apple cider vinegar, and the man was sentenced last month to 14 months in prison.
‘I think that’s in my DNA’
Hayes said the administration, from “Stephen Miller on down,” had worked to pressure and intimidate Omar, and he asked whether she had “a desire on your part to not let the b*****d see you sweat.”
“I think that’s in my DNA,” Omar said. “I am not going to let them see me break because I know they want that.”
Asked whether it is too much pressure for one person, she said, “Yeah, I mean, in my faith teachings, you know, we believe that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle. That he doesn’t burden us with more than we can handle. And I think, you know, I’m designed uniquely by God to withstand all of this.”
She said that despite “the enormous level of death threats that I deal with and my family in general deals with,” she is “a person of enormous faith.”
“And I know that, you know, if I continue to live my truth, if I continue to fight for the right things, if I continue to stand up to bullies and people who are carrying out ungodly corruption, I’m gonna be OK,” she said.
Asked whether she ever wants to quit, Omar said, “Now you’ve got the real question. I think that is ultimately what they want.” She added, “I mean, obviously they like to see me locked up, deported, and all of those things.”
“Yeah, but I think like the bigger satisfaction for them would be for me to be like, listen, like I’m tired of all of you, and I’m going to leave because they’ve always believed that someone of my background, you know, of my faith, shouldn’t be in Congress, shouldn’t have a position where they are influencing U.S. law,” she said.
“But in a country, I know the president keeps saying, she talks about the Constitution, in a country governed by our Constitution, I have a legal right to be a member of Congress, and I am honored the people who helped welcome my family and helped raise me also think so.”
Obama, Democrats and Emmer
Former President Barack Obama wrote on X on Oct. 18 that the investigation was “appalling” and that “the full weight of the federal government is being brought down” on Omar to “uncover a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago.” He said it “should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views,” and warned that “if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her.”
“The conspiracy world that I find myself in is the conspiracy world that was created around him,” Omar said, an apparent reference to the false claims, long promoted by Trump, that Obama was not born in the United States.
“And so while some people might feel reserved in some of the information that they hear from these people, I think he is acutely capable of seeing what this is, what this is, what the purpose of what they are doing is, and that no matter how much you want to fight and debunk, there’s never going to be any evidence, any clearing of your name, because they are going to continue to believe these things because it has now become a desperate truth to them that they have to hold on to,” she said.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and Reps. Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar called the search “deeply disturbing.” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Trump “is abusing his power to go after political opponents weeks before an election.” Asked whether her colleagues have stood by her, Omar said, “I do. I do, privately and publicly. People have been incredibly kind, whether they’re in elected office in Congress or elected around the country; I feel covered.”
Hayes asked whether any Republicans had reached out “to be like, this s***s.” Omar said none had, including members of Minnesota’s delegation.
“No. No, no, I mean, they’re, like, one of them is actually on TV every day saying, ‘When are we arresting her?'” she said.
“So, you know, Emmer would like to distract from the fact that he is like one of the worst whips in the history of America and that, you know, his like best friend was a, you know, a child sex trafficker who’s now serving 26 years,” Omar said. “So, you know, he doesn’t want people to talk about his s****y record. He would like people to be focused on me.”
Omar appeared to be referring to Anton Lazzaro, a Minnesota Republican donor who was sentenced in 2023 to 21 years in prison for sex trafficking minors. Lazzaro gave $15,600 to House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, whose campaign donated the money to charity after the charges became public.
Emmer told Fox News Digital last week that if Omar lied to gain citizenship, “she should probably serve time in the gray bar motel and then get the h**l out of here.” He said a judge “had to determine that there was probable cause that a federal crime has been committed.” Republican Rep. Nancy Mace has said that if fraud is proven, Omar “should be denaturalized and removed from this country.”
‘Everybody can see this for what it is’
Omar faces a Republican challenger on Nov. 3 in a rematch of 2024, when she won Minnesota’s heavily Democratic 5th Congressional District, which includes Minneapolis, by 50 percentage points. The Justice Department has said it does not comment on ongoing investigations.
Asked whether she is confident she will come out of the investigation with her freedom intact, Omar said, “I’m confident in my truth. I’m confident in the fact that I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m confident in the fact that, you know, if there were real people who were not politically motivated, like there were real people in 2019 and there were real people in 2024, when they looked at my husband and my finances, that, yeah, there would be no indictment. There would be, you know, no continuation of this,” she said.
The New York Times has reported that a federal inquiry into her finances and dealings with a foreign citizen began in 2024, under the Biden administration.
Omar said even some people now at the Justice Department have said there was no reason to execute the warrant. She said the warrant allowed agents to search any time between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. “So to come at 6 tells you that,” she said, before adding, “and then they tipped off Fox News, right? They were the first on site, and they’re trolls.”
Fox News published photos of agents entering the home that it credited to Fox News Digital.
“And so, you know, everybody can see this for what it is,” Omar said. “And, you know, I do feel confident that when it’s all said and done,” she said, she will be just fine.”
