Rep. Ilhan Omar told a national interviewer she does not know if her former husband is her brother, even as federal agents advance an immigration fraud probe that already hit her Washington home and her relatives.
In her first media appearance after the search, the Minnesota Democrat sat down with MS NOW host Chris Hayes and faced the long-running claim head-on. When pressed on whether she and her ex-husband are related, Omar answered with a careful hedge rather than a flat rejection.
“Not to my knowledge,” she said.
That line is now part of a widening federal picture. Homeland Security Investigations agents executed a court-authorized search warrant at Omar’s Washington, D.C., residence on Oct. 12. The warrant, approved by U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew J. Sharbaugh of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sits inside an ongoing criminal investigation into possible false statements in her immigration and naturalization documents. Fox News reported the congresswoman’s television comments against that backdrop of active scrutiny.
Authorities seized her cellphone. The Associated Press reported that federal investigators issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to members of her family. Both the immigration-related case and a separate look at her campaign finances and financial disclosures remain open.
Omar told Hayes the family-relation story did not begin with federal agents. She pinned the origin on online rumor.
“It all started with the Somali blog. Somebody put it there, that he had to have been my brother or something to that effect.”
She denied marrying her former husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, to commit immigration fraud. She also framed the home search itself as politics. Omar said she believes the raid was meant to appeal to Republican base voters and to intimidate voters, and she called the investigation politically motivated.
After the search she posted a social media video filmed from the back of a car, urging supporters to keep sending money. The MS NOW sit-down was described as her first media appearance since the operation. Her office did not answer repeated requests for comment from Fox News Digital.
Readers tracking her public response have already seen the fundraising push play out in real time, including a tearful TikTok appeal for campaign donations while the probes continued.
The search did not appear in a vacuum. Breitbart reported that investigators collected garbage from Omar’s D.C. home in an effort to obtain her DNA before the raid, treating potential genetic evidence as critical to an immigration fraud case that includes alleged lies about her age on naturalization papers. Multiple sources familiar with the probe told NewsNation the inquiry is broader than the public fight over marital history alone.
Prior ICE interest in related claims stretched back months. The same reporting notes the possibility of civil proceedings that could lead to denaturalization if fraud is established. Scott Johnson described the line of questioning he faced: investigators asked about Omar’s immigration and naturalization and about her father, issues that would bear on the same core dispute, and indicated they were examining a possible civil path toward stripping citizenship.
That denaturalization risk is exactly the scenario flagged when the border czar outlined how proven fraud could cost citizenship and bring deportation.
Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, spoke with federal investigators in the week after the raid, according to Fox News Digital. The grand jury subpoenas already reached relatives. The Justice Department has not publicly detailed the full set of allegations inside the warrant.
The sequence matches earlier reporting that federal investigators questioned Omar’s sister after the HSI raid on the congresswoman’s D.C. home.
A second track involves money. A finance-related inquiry into campaign finances and financial disclosures reportedly began in 2024 during the Biden administration. A complaint about wealth disparities in her disclosures was dismissed by congressional ethics officials, yet U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced last week that the matter is now being investigated by authorities outside the Capitol.
The physical search itself was laid out in straightforward terms when agents raided the D.C. home and seized her phone in the immigration fraud probe.
HSI agents did not freelance the entry. They carried a warrant signed by a federal magistrate. The stated focus is possible false statements in immigration and naturalization paperwork, the same documents that determine who lawfully becomes a citizen and who holds the privileges that follow. Cellphone evidence and family subpoenas show investigators are building a record, not staging a one-day show.
Omar’s television answer did not close the file. “Not to my knowledge” leaves the central biographical claim unresolved while agents test DNA, documents, and sworn statements against one another. For a member of Congress who arrived as a Somali-born refugee and now notes federal law, the gap between personal narrative and official paperwork is not a cable-news sideshow. It is the kind of discrepancy naturalization law is written to catch.
Voters can watch the process play out in court filings and grand jury work rather than in fundraising videos. Accountability for statements made under oath does not bend because the subject holds office or calls the timing unfair.
When federal agents need trash bags and a magistrate’s signature to test a congresswoman’s story, the public is entitled to plain answers, not shrugs.
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