More than a dozen subpoenas, including to relatives of the congresswoman, seeking testimony before a grand jury in Minnesota. That is the current scale of a Trump administration investigation aimed at stripping Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar of her US citizenship and ultimately deporting her, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing US officials and people familiar with the probe. Al Jazeera carried the report.
The inquiry centres at least in part on how Omar obtained her citizenship after arriving in the United States from Somalia decades ago as a refugee. According to the Journal, investigators are examining her family’s immigration records and are focused both on the congresswoman and on the actions of her father, who is now deceased. Denaturalization — the legal revocation of citizenship — would require the government to prove that citizenship was unlawfully procured, typically through material fraud on the original application, either in a civil suit or via a criminal conviction.
The investigation has gone further than paper. Omar’s phone was seized by federal authorities, and the subpoenas were issued by a grand jury gathering evidence in Minnesota into potential fraud involving her immigration paperwork, Newsweek reported, citing a person briefed on the probe who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The allegations underlying the probe are not new. Conservative outlets have for years claimed that Omar’s 2009 legal marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — contracted while a 2002 religious marriage to another man had not yet been legally dissolved — was in fact a marriage to her own brother, arranged to secure him immigration status. Omar has long denied the claim and called it baseless. What is new is institutional weight: a sitting congresswoman’s relatives under grand jury subpoena, her phone in federal custody, and a Justice Department that has elevated denaturalization as a priority under the current administration, pursuing both civil and criminal cases against people accused of material misrepresentation on citizenship applications.
The legal bar is high by design. Because Omar says she derived citizenship automatically as a minor when her father naturalised in 2000, a denaturalization case against her would likely have to reach back to fraud in his immigration file — the actions of a man who can no longer testify — or to omissions on her own later applications. “Knowingly procuring naturalization unlawfully” is the criminal charge that, on conviction, requires revocation of citizenship, as defence attorney Todd Spodek noted in press coverage of the probe. Proving what a dead man wrote on a form decades ago, and that a then-minor daughter knew of it, is a harder evidentiary problem than the politics of the announcement.
No charges have been filed, and the investigation’s existence is so far documented through subpoenas and a seized phone rather than any indictment. The number that will tell whether this probe is a case or a pressure campaign is what comes out of the Minnesota grand jury: an indictment, or nothing.