The Trump administration is seeking to strip Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar of her US citizenship and deport her, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing US officials and others familiar with the investigation. The revelation follows Monday’s raid on her Washington D.C. home, and the issuing of more than a dozen subpoenas, including to members of her family.
The administration is using the persecution of Omar as a battering ram against citizenship itself. Its political objective is to make the right to remain in the country contingent on loyalty and submission to the president. A sitting congresswoman who arrived in the United States as a child refugee and became a citizen more than a quarter-century ago is being threatened with expulsion for opposing Trump.
According to the Journal, agents seized Omar’s cellphone, personal computers, notebooks and passport during the early-morning search on October 12. Only Omar and her husband were home. The Justice Department confirmed that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), executed a court-authorized warrant, but declined to elaborate.
CNN reported Wednesday that US Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh of the D.C. federal district court in Washington authorized the search. Prosecutors first spent several days pressing for broad access to records in Omar’s home. Sharbaugh required a screening process to protect material concerning her legislative work under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Those restrictions did not prevent the raid or the seizure of her personal records and devices.
The New York Times reported that relatives of Omar have also received subpoenas, while the Journal reported that authorities had issued more than a dozen seeking testimony before a Minnesota grand jury. Investigators are examining the family’s immigration paperwork, including the actions of Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, who died in 2020.
The central allegation concerns whether Omar or her father misrepresented her age when she obtained citizenship in 2000. Investigators are seeking to establish that she was already 18, rather than 17, and therefore did not qualify to acquire citizenship through her father as a minor. Omar maintains that she was born in 1982 and has denied committing immigration fraud.
“President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress. There is no basis for this,” her office told the Journal on Wednesday.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, Omar fled the country with her family after civil war broke out. They spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before being admitted to the United States in 1995. In her memoir, she described the opportunity to immigrate as a “golden ticket.” The family initially settled in Arlington, Virginia, outside Washington, before moving to Minnesota. Omar has said she was 12 when she arrived and became a citizen in 2000.
The administration is revisiting allegations that officials previously declined to pursue. The Journal reported that HSI examined a similar tip under Biden but did not move forward because it lacked evidence of fraud. CNN reported that the immigration case was reopened in 2025. This is distinct from a financial investigation initiated under Biden in June 2024, which stalled for a lack of evidence.
The Washington Post reported Thursday evening that a review under Trump in 2019 also found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing by Omar.
No immigration fraud charges against Omar have been announced. The government has not publicly established that either she or her father falsified the information now under scrutiny. Yet the administration is openly discussing the punishment it wants to impose while investigators search for a basis to carry it out.
Trump has spent years directing racist and dehumanizing attacks against Omar and Somali Americans. At his Ohio rally on Monday evening, hours after the raid, the audience chanted “deport” as he attacked Omar and other Somalis. “They cheat on everything,” Trump declared. “We’re not going to stand for it.”
The same president who incessantly denounced the prosecution over his January 6 coup attempt as political persecution is deploying federal police against his opponents on the basis of unproven allegations concerning decades-old paperwork. Whether Omar was 17 or 18 when her father became a citizen cannot justify this campaign of political banishment.
Socialists defend the right of workers and their children to live and work in the country of their choice, with full democratic rights. Modern society depends on the coordinated labor of workers across the world, linked through international production and transportation networks. While capital moves across borders in pursuit of profit, workers are confined, detained and deported by the rival nation-states that defend capitalist property. The struggle for workers’ freedom of movement is inseparable from the struggle to abolish the capitalist nation-state system and establish world socialism.
The threatened deportation of Omar takes place amid the campaign by the Trump administration to greatly accelerate the pace of deportations, which exposes its victims to imprisonment, persecution and death. This summer, deportation flights to Haiti increased from monthly to weekly despite the country’s violence and humanitarian crisis. Human Rights Watch documented five consecutive weekly flights between August 20 and September 17 carrying a total of 474 people.
The administration has also expanded renditions to third countries, sending people to places where they have no ties or legal status. On September 29, the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on these removals while litigation continues. Deportees have faced arbitrary detention, beatings and disappearance.
Monday’s raid came just 22 days before the November 3 midterm elections, in which Omar is heavily favored to retain her Minneapolis-based seat. The attack coincides with Trump administration demands to exclude the ballots of supposedly ineligible voters in California and a wider campaign against the election itself. The investigation could provide a pretext for Trump and his congressional allies to challenge Omar’s legitimacy and attempt to block her taking her seat if she wins.
The pursuit of Omar is part of a sweeping expansion of the government’s campaign to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship. According to administration officials cited by the Wall Street Journal, more than 200 denaturalization lawsuits have been filed since Trump returned to office.
An August 21 report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) identified at least 105 denaturalization suits in the first seven months of 2026, including 50 in July alone, which it described as “an all-time high.” By comparison, it identified 125 suits during the entire period from 2008 through 2025, with no filings found in 30 states. Sixteen of those states recorded filings in 2026 through July.
TRAC warned that its figures could understate the actual scale of the campaign. The true number of suits, it explained, “may be higher since there is no reliable way to identify every court action.” It added: “While claiming that it is filing a record number of denaturalization suits, the DoJ is highly selective about which suits it publicizes and which ones it fails to make public.”
As the Trump administration moves to strip a Democratic congresswoman of her citizenship and deport her on bogus pretexts, leading figures in her own party have responded with silence or empty denunciations.
As of Thursday, no public statements could be found from Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer condemning the attack on Omar, while House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries has uttered only platitudes. This response was accompanied by other Democrats’ milquetoast denunciations unaccompanied by concrete action. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for example, accused Trump of “abusing his power to go after political opponents weeks before an election,” but proposed nothing to stop him.
Walz explained the political outlook behind this inaction at Georgetown University on Thursday: “I am a product of the institutions, I defend the status quo.” He coupled this declaration with the claim that he was under no obligation to meet fascism “halfway.” Yet during Operation Metro Surge, his deployment of the National Guard and Minnesota police forces in support of the immigration Gestapo, together with the trade union bureaucracies’ containment of opposition within one-day protests, blocked the development of the mass movement building in response to the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
Such actions actively defend the institutions through which fascism develops. One-day protests and appeals to “remember in November” have brought no justice to the families of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, murdered in Minneapolis by federal agents, or the thousands of other families whose lives have been shattered by the mass deportation operation. As the attack on Ilhan Omar demonstrates, that operation is being expanded into a weapon against all political opposition.
The capitalist status quo defended by Walz and the Democrats has produced staggering concentrations of wealth and power and nurtured the fascist forces now attacking citizenship itself. Defending democratic rights and holding Trump and his accomplices accountable requires the independent mobilization of the working class, armed with the lessons of history and a Marxist program, against both parties of the capitalist ruling class.