Denaturalization filings exceed 200 this term
Administration officials have touted what they say is the most wide-ranging effort in Justice Department history to strip people of their citizenship. In all, the administration has filed more than 200 lawsuits against convicted criminals and others it is seeking to denaturalize. Before Trump took office this term, denaturalization cases were rare, with the government filing roughly a dozen or fewer a year, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that tracks federal immigration data. Omar’s case, if it proceeds, could become the highest-profile — and most controversial — part of that effort.
Federal agents searched Omar’s Washington, D.C., home early Monday morning, three weeks before the midterm election in which she is seeking re-election. Only the congresswoman and her husband were home at the time. Items taken from the residence included her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and passport, according to people familiar with the search. The Justice Department said Homeland Security agents executed a court-authorized search but declined to elaborate.
The multipronged investigation is focused at least in part on how Omar — who was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1982 and arrived in the United States from a refugee camp in Kenya in 1995 — became a U.S. citizen in 2000, and on the actions of her deceased father in the immigration process, according to people familiar with the probe. Nur Omar Mohamed brought his daughter and other family members to the U.S. when she was a child.
At the center of the inquiry is whether Omar or her father changed her age on her citizenship application to show she was 17 years old rather than 18. Had she been 17 at the time of the application, she would have qualified for automatic naturalization as a minor rather than needing to pursue her own immigration process.
Officials at Homeland Security Investigations looked into a similar tip under the Biden administration and decided not to move forward because they lacked evidence of fraud, people familiar with those earlier efforts said. Leon Fresco, a top immigration official at the Justice Department during the Obama administration, said the Trump administration’s case would hinge on finding material evidence that Omar herself lied about her age, rather than her father having done so on her behalf. “That would make the case significantly easier to prosecute,” Fresco said. “But either way, they are not traveling a well-paved road here.”
The government cannot simply strip a person of their U.S. citizenship. The Justice Department must file a lawsuit in federal court and prove that the person lied in a material way to gain their citizenship. Most of the cases the Justice Department has filed this term have not yet been decided.
Omar has denied the underlying allegations for years. In a Wall Street Journal interview earlier this year, she said she had never committed immigration fraud. Her office said Wednesday: “President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress. There is no basis for this.”
Federal authorities have also issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to some of Omar’s relatives, for testimony before a Minnesota grand jury, a person familiar with those proceedings said. Among other things, the investigation is examining her family’s immigration paperwork.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, said her office was separately investigating Omar’s financial disclosures. “There are several investigations going on,” Pirro said Tuesday on Fox News. “If there was a crime that was committed it will be prosecuted.” Pirro said it “doesn’t matter” that a nonpartisan entity charged with reviewing misconduct allegations involving members of Congress earlier this year cleared Omar of wrongdoing in connection with documents she submitted to Congress that dramatically overstated her wealth.
President Trump has long called for Omar’s deportation. The Journal reported that Trump uses her “as a rallying point for the GOP’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim wings.” On Monday evening in Ohio, an audience Trump was addressing chanted “deport” after he talked about Omar and other Somalis. “They cheat on everything,” he said. “We’re not going to stand for it.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told a conservative podcaster last month that there was a continuing federal investigation into Omar, who he said “married her brother to try to bring him into the United States” — a claim Trump has repeatedly made and Omar has denied for more than a decade.
Omar, 44, has been the subject of multiple Republican-led investigations, and a Minnesota welfare-fraud case involving defendants of Somali descent has drawn attention in the same period.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1982 into an affluent family, she initially settled in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., before her family moved to Minnesota as she entered high school. She lost her mother when she was in preschool, according to her memoir “This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey From Refugee to Congresswoman.” As a self-described “spoiled youngest child,” she was raised by her father and a collection of family members. Her father died in June 2020 at age 67 from what she has said were complications from Covid-19; in the U.S., he worked as a cabdriver and a postal worker. Allegations of immigration fraud have surrounded Omar since she first ran for public office in 2016, when she won a seat in the Minnesota House; those questions have often been tied to her multiple marriages.