WASHINGTON ― Homeland Security Investigations agents raided the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Monday morning as part of a criminal investigation into the Minnesota progressive who has long been the target of ugly attacks by President Donald Trump.
“Today in the Washington, D.C, area, Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice,” a Justice Department spokesperson told HuffPost in a statement. “This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”
The DOJ spokesperson would not give any details about the justification for its probe, which is reportedly related to immigration paperwork filled out by Omar’s now-deceased father when she was a child. Omar, who is Somali-American, came to the United States as a refugee in 1995, and has been a U.S. citizen for 26 years.
The Department of Homeland Security and the White House both deferred to the DOJ for any comment.
The Minnesota Democrat, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress and an outspoken critic of Trump’s policies, has endured years of racist and Islamophobic attacks by the president. In a statement, she ripped Trump for once again trying to politically intimidate her, this time weeks out from the midterm elections.
“I’m ok,” Omar said on social media. “Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.”
She added: “I will not be silenced.”
Separately, Omar’s spokeswoman Jackie Rogers called the Trump administration’s raid “an outrageous abuse of power.”
“Donald Trump has relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with inflammatory rhetoric, repeatedly putting a target on her back,” Rogers told HuffPost in a statement. “Now, those attacks have escalated to a pointless federal raid. The Congresswoman has done nothing wrong. No president should be able to use the power of the federal government to intimidate his political enemies.”
The decision to conduct a raid within the 60-day window before the November elections appears to break with standard DOJ practice of avoiding such investigative steps involving political candidates this close to an election.
On top of that, if there is any merit to the administration’s investigation ― which has yet to be shown ― immigrants who obtain citizenship status through fraud that they didn’t know about can avoid consequences for it, like losing a green card, says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council.
“So this is *even weaker* than it already seems,” he said on social media of the Trump administration’s apparent justification for its raid on Omar’s home.
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, declined to offer any details on the raid during a Monday appearance on Fox News.
“The specifics of the investigation, I think I need to turn that over to Todd Blanche or Markwayne Mullin,” he said. “I don’t want to get ahead of them.”
Homan has previously said the administration was investigating Omar over allegations — made by the president without evidence — that she married her brother to get U.S. citizenship.
At the time, Omar reacted to the news, saying the probe was launched “because they are sick.”