Minneapolis Somali leaders accused President Trump of breaking the law and targeting their community after federal agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home in a citizenship fraud investigation.
Homeland Security Investigations agents executed a search warrant at the Minnesota Democrat’s Washington residence early Monday morning, part of a federal probe into whether she or her late father fraudulently filled out her citizenship paperwork decades ago. Fox News Digital reported that members of Minnesota’s Somali community, including Minneapolis City Council Vice President Jamal Osman, responded with sharp criticism of the president and his administration.
The Wall Street Journal later reported that agents seized Omar’s phone, passport, and computers. Omar has not been seen publicly since the raid, and she posted a social media statement Monday afternoon calling the action an abuse of power.
That reaction in the Twin Cities framed a familiar clash: local officials and residents cast a judicially authorized search as political revenge, while the White House pointed to the president’s public comments and left the case with the Justice Department.
Osman, a Somali-born council leader, told Fox News Digital the community felt under siege. He tied the home search to broader immigration enforcement and accused the president of crossing legal lines.
“Somalis, we all feel attacked by President Trump,” Osman said. “Our president has broken the law many times. ICE [is] terrorizing our community... and we're not surprised such action has taken place.”
"We have seen the threats, the horrific language he uses against my community. It's unacceptable, and we're hoping this could stop."
Osman added that the United States is “the land of the laws” and said he does not expect anyone “to break the U.S. Constitution.” He warned against talk of deporting Omar or “thousands of Somalis” without court process and due process. His message to the president was blunt: “Stop it.” He also said, “We're American citizens like everyone else.”
Abdi, a 37-year-old Minneapolis social worker who was born in Somalia and declined to give his last name, went further. He said raiding a congresswoman felt like an effort “to dehumanize and also humiliate someone that is part of the Congress.” He claimed Trump “hates Somali people because of Ilhan Omar,” called it “personal,” and said the president treats her as someone “below him.”
"If they take the citizenship away from her, then I will say, ‘Are we in a dictatorship?’ That's using power to use against an American citizen, then maybe the thinking we have for the United States is completely different."
A 22-year-old Somali American woman who declined to be named said she thought a probe “was bound to happen soon enough,” citing years of questions about Omar’s immigration status and naturalization.
The search was not a free-ranging political stunt on paper. A Department of Justice spokesperson said Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized warrant secured by the DOJ as part of an ongoing federal investigation, National Review reported.
Just the News noted that an HSI spokesperson described the action the same way: a judicially authorized search warrant in an ongoing federal criminal investigation tied to immigration paperwork filled out by Omar’s late father when she was a child after the family fled Somalia.
Sources have said the file examines whether Omar or her father, Nur Mohamed, misrepresented facts on citizenship papers years ago, and that the case could lead to denaturalization. The New York Post reported agents took her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport from her D.C. bungalow, and that prosecutors are weighing birth-record conflicts and whether her claim to citizenship through her father’s 2000 naturalization involved concealment or misrepresentation when she was still a minor.
Those details sit alongside a longer public record of scrutiny. Border officials have previously confirmed probes into her entry and status, and the case has also drawn attention in coverage of the ongoing criminal investigation into alleged immigration fraud.
Omar’s team cast the raid as the latest chapter in a personal campaign. In her Monday afternoon social media statement, she called the search “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.”
"For a decade, Donald Trump has relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with inflammatory rhetoric, repeatedly putting a target on her back. Now, those attacks have escalated to a pointless federal raid. The Congresswoman has done nothing wrong. No president should be able to use the power of the federal government to intimidate his political enemies."
Her office has also said there is “no basis” for the case and that the president would love to sideline a progressive voice in Congress. Jacklyn Rogers, her communications director, echoed the abuse-of-power line in statements carried across outlets.
When the White House was reached, it pointed to the president’s own remarks. Trump said he has “always found her to be totally crooked, personally, but that has nothing to do with me.” He called her “a terrible person” and “just a complainer,” said she “comes from a country that is a non-country” and then “complains about our Constitution,” and stressed the rest: “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ. I have nothing to do with it.”
That separation matters. A warrant signed off through the Justice Department is not the same thing as a president ordering a political hit, and the public still has not seen charging documents, a denaturalization complaint, or a full inventory beyond the devices and passport described in reporting. Related coverage has also tracked Trump’s public blasts of Omar after the federal home search and the crowd reaction that followed.
One day after the raid, House progressives moved on a different front. Rep. Delia Ramirez introduced the Reimagining Safety Act to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and Customs and Border Protection, Breitbart reported. Co-sponsors included Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Adelita Grijalva, and Jim McGovern. The measure would halt border control, interior enforcement, and migrant detention as currently structured.
Ramirez argued that deaths and uses of force involving ICE and CBP are reason enough to scrap DHS and build “something new.” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin answered that protecting the homeland “should never be controversial” and said the push “really comes down to” an anti-law-enforcement stance.
The sequence is hard to miss. Federal agents serve a fraud warrant on a sitting member of Congress; allies on the left answer by trying to abolish the immigration agencies that enforce the law. That is the policy choice on the table, not a vibe.
Background fights over Omar’s personal history have run on a parallel track, including official comments on claims she married her brother and could face deportation over immigration fraud and separate explainers on why some immigration officials say marriage allegations alone may not support removal. ICE has also withheld FOIA records on Omar while citing active enforcement proceedings.
Osman is right about one structural point: America runs on statutes, warrants, and courts. A search warrant is part of that system. So is a fraud investigation that reaches back to paperwork filed decades ago. Civil denaturalization cases are not bound by the same clock that limits some criminal counts, which is why old filings can still matter when evidence of misrepresentation surfaces.
What the Minneapolis speakers treated as proof of a “regime” out to humiliate Somalis is, on the government’s side, a DOJ-backed warrant and an open criminal fraud file. No injuries or arrests from the raid itself were reported. The seized passport and devices are classic evidence steps in an immigration-fraud case, not a street spectacle.
Omar remains a member of Congress until voters or a court say otherwise. She is entitled to defend the forms, the dates, and the family history at issue. Taxpayers are entitled to know whether a naturalization file was clean. Those interests do not cancel each other out.
The Somali community voices in Minneapolis cast every enforcement move as collective punishment. The record in this case is narrower: a specific warrant, a specific house, and a specific question about citizenship papers tied to Omar and her late father. If the paperwork holds, the case should collapse. If it does not, the law is not “dictatorship” for noticing.
Equal citizenship means equal scrutiny when fraud allegations meet a judge’s signature, no special shield for a safe seat, and no free pass for officials who answer a warrant with a campaign to scrap ICE.
