By Devlin Barrett, Hamed Aleaziz, Alan Feuer and Ernesto Londoño
Federal agents executed a search warrant at the home of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota on Monday, according to three people briefed on the matter, the kind of investigative step the Justice Department has long shied away from so close to an election.
The court-approved search of her Washington-area home comes after Department of Homeland Security officials said in recent months that they were investigating Omar, a Democrat, over her family’s immigration paperwork. More recently, some federal investigators have also sought to investigate other issues, such as Omar’s finances, campaign funds and interactions with a foreign citizen, as The New York Times previously reported.
The three people who described the execution of the search warrant spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.
The search warrant, executed 22 days before Election Day, lists a series of potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, as well as a general conspiracy charge, according to a person familiar with the document.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said that Homeland Security Investigations agents — a part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — executed a judicially authorized search of a home in the Washington area, as part of an “ongoing federal criminal investigation.” The spokeswoman declined to comment further.
Jackie Rogers, Omar’s spokeswoman, did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent by email and text message Monday morning.
In September, Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, said his department was investigating issues surrounding Omar and her family’s immigration to the United States, and suggested the end result could be deportation.
Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in the early 1980s. Her family fled their hometown when she was around 8, as a civil war engulfed the country, according to a memoir she wrote. In the mid-1990s, after spending time at a refugee camp in Kenya, Omar and her relatives were admitted as refugees in the United States. They started a new life in Minnesota, which is home to the largest Somali diaspora in the United States.
Omar has long said that suggestions that she and her family committed immigration fraud were false and politically motivated.
“I will say it again so it’s as clear as possible: I’m not at all worried about these investigations, because they are complete shams,” she wrote in a fund-raising email in September.
Monday’s search of her home, which was reported earlier by Fox News, takes place within the 60-day window before an election. Justice Department policy has long urged prosecutors not to take any overt, unnecessary investigative steps that could affect an election during that period — especially if such actions could be taken after the election without causing any harm to the investigation. The guiding principle of the 60-day rule is that prosecutors should exercise caution in regard to politically sensitive cases.
The rule is not absolute, and there are exceptions, such as instances where prosecutors believe evidence could be destroyed, ongoing crimes are being committed, or people are in danger. The rule is also largely an interpretation of Justice Department regulations, and as such has been the subject of significant debate about its exact parameters. For many years, however, Justice Department officials have concluded that a publicly observable search — such as of a politician’s home or business — is the kind of overt activity that should be avoided during the 60-day period.
In the last federal election, Mr. Trump cited the 60-day rule in his own criminal cases to accuse the department of acting improperly in 2024 as he campaigned for election. He and his lawyers, some of whom now run the Justice Department, argued that the special counsel, Jack Smith, broke the 60-day rule when he filed court papers in September 2024 describing the evidence supporting charges that Mr. Trump conspired to obstruct the results of the 2020 election. In that instance, however, the key decisions were made by the courts, which are not subject to the department policy.
Omar has represented a solidly blue district that includes Minneapolis since 2019, and she faced no serious competitors during the primary this year.
