Federal investigators interviewed Rep. Ilhan Omar’s sister after searching the Minnesota Democrat’s D.C. home in an immigration fraud probe, a case border officials say could strip her of citizenship.
Sahra Noor voluntarily spoke with authorities last week, after agents searched the northeast Washington bungalow Omar shares with husband Tim Mynett on Oct. 12. The interview came as the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office pressed an immigration fraud investigation centered on long-running allegations about the congresswoman’s family paperwork and marriages.
The New York Post reported that Noor, an author promoting her book “Salt in the Snow: A Somali Immigrant Story,” was scheduled to appear at the University of Minnesota’s Rochester branch on Thursday of last week and canceled. A local bookstore representative told Fox News Digital the reason was a “family emergency.”
Noor did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The voluntary sit-down marks a fresh turn in a probe that has already produced a home search, DNA collection, and subpoenas reaching across Omar’s extended family, while the Squad member and her lawyers brand the entire effort a political hit job.
Fox News reported that Homeland Security Investigations executed the warrant at Omar’s D.C. residence and that agents took her personal phone, passport, and computer. Roughly a dozen people, including relatives, have been subpoenaed as investigators examine whether Omar or her father falsified information on citizenship paperwork.
The same reporting described the inquiry as a criminal immigration fraud investigation. Evidence pulled from the home, whistleblowers, and government records is what sources say now gives prosecutors a solid basis to go before a grand jury on charges of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud.
Federal agents also obtained DNA samples in an effort to test whether Omar, and possibly other family members, defrauded immigration authorities. Results have not been publicly detailed.
Omar answered the raid with a statement on X that cast the operation as pure politics.
"This raid by Trump’s DHS is an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies."
She added that the congresswoman “has done nothing wrong” and that “no president should be able to use the power of the federal government to intimidate his political enemies.” That framing collides with the paper trail agents are assembling, and with parallel work already underway on her finances.
The phone and device seizures fit a broader pattern of evidence collection that began with the home search itself and has since expanded to family interviews.
At the core of the immigration case is the allegation that Omar married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 to help him obtain a green card, an arrangement critics have long claimed was a sibling marriage. Omar has repeatedly denied the sibling-marriage accusation since she first sought public office in the Minnesota legislature in 2016.
Elmi and Omar divorced in 2017. In 2019, Elmi applied for a marriage-based green card and then withdrew the application after U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asked for additional information about his relationship with Omar, reporting on the paperwork probe has noted in related coverage of the same inquiry.
Omar’s marital timeline is tangled on the public record. She had an Islamic wedding ceremony with Ahmed Hirsi in 2002. Her legal marriage to Hirsi was not entered until after the divorce from Elmi was finalized. She filed joint taxes with Hirsi in 2014 and 2015 while still legally married to Elmi, then divorced Hirsi in 2019 to marry Mynett, a political consultant who had done work for her campaign.
She has three children; the last was born while she was still legally married to Elmi. Separate sourcing has also pointed to questions about whether Omar or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, misrepresented her birth date so she could become a U.S. citizen when her father naturalized in 2000. The family emigrated from war-torn Somalia via Kenya in 1995.
Trump administration border czar Tom Homan said Saturday that federal investigators have built “a strong case” that could lead to the denaturalization of Omar if immigration fraud is proven. That warning lands as Minnesota prosecutors run the immigration track and D.C. prosecutors work a second line of inquiry.
Homan’s assessment of the citizenship risk underscores how far the government believes the evidence may reach, past a routine records review and into the rare territory of stripping naturalized status.
Breitbart reported that the Justice Department has issued subpoenas to relatives, including Sahra Noor, while officials scour the family’s history for fraud and false statements in immigration paperwork. DHS agents removed boxes of documents from the D.C. home during the search.
D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is overseeing a separate probe into Omar and Mynett’s finances, including entries on House disclosure forms. In the last year Omar deflated her reported net worth by tens of millions of dollars because of an unexplained accounting “discrepancy,” according to characterizations of that inquiry. Pirro has confirmed multiple investigations are active.
"There are several investigations going on, and I don’t think there’s any question, but if there was a crime that was committed, it will be prosecuted."
That is the opposite of a fishing expedition framed for cable news. It is a prosecutor saying the facts will decide whether charges follow.
Last week attorneys Amy Jeffress and Joshua Matz sent the Justice Department a letter stating they had “grave concerns” with the investigation and demanding the “immediate return” of all seized property. They claimed agents failed to comply with a magistrate judge’s “special requests” for executing the search warrant and flouted longstanding DOJ policy by conducting the search with just over three weeks left before the midterm elections.
A Justice Department spokesperson rejected the letter in blunt terms, saying it was “riddled with false allegations and inaccuracies.”
"Our attorneys and law enforcement partners complied with all court orders and legal obligations, as they always do."
The same spokesperson added: “Leaking a letter to the press right after sending it is not good faith. It is a publicity play.”
Omar’s camp wants the story to be about timing and motive. Prosecutors keep pointing back to warrants, court orders, DNA, subpoenas, and a withdrawn green-card file that collapsed when USCIS asked harder questions in 2019.
Some voices on the left rushed to Omar’s defense after the raid, including familiar calls to rally around her as a target of the administration. Those political defenses after the home search do not answer the records gap agents are testing with family interviews and genetic samples.
Omar represents a state already living with large-scale public fraud scandals that have drained taxpayer dollars and eroded trust in oversight. Voters there have watched program abuse stories pile up even as progressive leaders preach equity and open-handed immigration policy.
A sitting member of Congress does not get a softer rulebook than the people she legislates for. If the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office and federal partners can show false statements on immigration forms, a sham marriage for status, or citizenship paperwork built on fiction, the law supplies remedies, indictment, and in extreme cases denaturalization, that apply the same way to a “Squad” progressive as to anyone else.
Noor’s canceled book event and quiet interview with investigators are not proof of guilt. They are proof the inquiry is no longer confined to dusty files. Relatives are being asked questions. Devices and documents are in government custody. DNA is in the lab. Grand jury talk is no longer theoretical in the accounts of people familiar with the evidence.
Omar’s denials have been consistent since 2016. Consistency is not the same thing as corroboration. The withdrawn 2019 green-card application, the overlapping marriages and tax filings, the disclosure-form plunge measured in tens of millions, and the post-raid family interviews all sit on the other side of the scale.
Federal investigators are testing a simple proposition: whether a high-profile Democrat who lectures the country on immigration followed the rules when her own family’s status was on the line. The sister’s interview moves that test from the house search into the living circle of people who know the history best.
Equal enforcement is not revenge. It is the bare minimum a lawful immigration system owes every citizen who did the paperwork straight.