At about six in the morning on October 12, Homeland Security investigators came to the door of Ilhan Omar’s house in Washington carrying a warrant. The Democratic congresswoman from Minneapolis said nothing in public about it for more than a week. On Wednesday she gave her first interview, to Chris Hayes on MS NOW, and the main news in it was simple: she is moving out. The search, she said, had left her feeling unsafe in the house, according to the Associated Press account carried by Al Jazeera.
Her reasons were practical. Her address has been made public, and she already lives with death threats. With her children visiting from time to time, and with people able to follow them, staying in the house is no longer feasible, the Star Tribune reported her saying.
An inventory
She also described the morning itself. She and her husband, Tim Mynett, were in bed when agents started pounding on the doors. Between 15 and 25 of them, by her count, went through the house room by room, according to accounts of the interview published by HuffPost and Fox 9 in Minneapolis. The search went on for four or five hours. When it was over, 17 items had been taken: two of her phones, her youngest daughter’s phone, notebooks belonging to Mynett, a children’s book in the Somali language, and a vintage camera her husband had been given as a gift.
A seizure inventory is a strange document. It lists what the state carried away but never why. A daughter’s phone and a picture book for children sit on the same list as a congresswoman’s notebooks, and the list itself explains none of it.
Omar called the agents “intrusive but polite.” PBS NewsHour reported her account that they logged everything they took and put everything else back where they found it. Fox News had reported earlier that agents seized her passport and that investigators obtained her DNA. In the interview Omar denied that any DNA was collected during the search.
The charge no one has named
The Justice Department has said little. A spokesperson described a “judicially authorised search warrant” carried out as part of an “ongoing federal criminal investigation” into alleged immigration fraud. The government has not said what crime, if any, Omar herself is accused of. A person who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity said investigators are looking at possible fraud in her family’s immigration paperwork and have issued grand jury subpoenas to some of her relatives. NBC News, citing one person familiar with the matter, reported that possible charges could include conspiracy and making false statements on her immigration papers.
Omar came to the United States at the age of 12, after her family was granted asylum, and became a citizen in 2000. She aimed her sharpest line at that arithmetic. “It would be a huge undertaking to, I suppose, indict a 12-year-old for so cleverly conspiring to defraud immigration services,” she said, adding: “I’m sure there are a lot of smart 12-year-olds, but that seems like a leap.”
She said she is “confident in the fact that I didn’t do anything wrong.” Her lawyers call the investigation political retaliation for her opposition to President Donald Trump, and they have accused the department of violating the search order. In the interview she also responded to allegations about her finances and to the old claim about her marriage, the conspiracy theory that she married her brother, which she called “insane.” She has called such claims “disgusting lies” in the past.
Weeks before a vote
The timing was the part that unsettled her most. The search came three weeks before the November 3 midterms, in which she is seeking re-election in a safely Democratic district centred on Minneapolis and is expected to win. The Justice Department has traditionally avoided overt investigative steps against candidates close to an election, a custom that was never written down. Congressional Democrats condemned the search and questioned why it happened when it did, MPR News reported.
The president has gone after her personally. Trump recently called Omar “sick” and “dishonest” and insulted Somalia, the country where she was born. Her move out of Washington comes as Al Jazeera has documented a rise in violence against public officials across the country.
Anyone who has watched governments at work learns that power does not always need a verdict to change someone’s life. Sometimes a warrant, a morning and a published address are enough. Omar has not been charged with anything. Even so, she is the one packing up the house.