President Trump told an Iowa rally that Rep. Ilhan Omar must resign after a Justice Department filing used what he called her fake name, and said Republicans had picked up a House seat.
At a Thursday night rally in Sioux City, Iowa, President Donald Trump zeroed in on a Department of Justice filing that referred to Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi.” He told the crowd the name matched her former husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, and argued the discrepancy meant she could not stay in Congress.
“Because she used a fake name to be sworn in, I assume she must immediately have to resign from Congress,” Trump said, according to Daily Mail reporting on the event. He called down to House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was in the audience, and declared that Democrats had “just conceded her seat.”
The crowd answered with a familiar chant: “lock her up.” Trump later posted on Truth Social that “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, her real name, has openly admitted to FRAUD, and she will not be legally allowed to be a Member of this August Body from this point forth.”
The Iowa remarks did not arrive in a vacuum. On October 12, Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington, D.C., residence as part of a criminal fraud probe into immigration paperwork. Agents spent four to five hours on the scene, removed 17 items, including phones, notebooks, a vintage camera, and a Somali-language book, and left the congresswoman describing the operation as “intrusive but polite.”
Investigators have also issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, some involving Omar’s relatives. The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office is examining whether false statements were made in immigration documents concerning her birth date. No charges or formal disqualification have been announced.
That same probe produced the filing Trump waved at the rally. Court papers referred to her as Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, also known as Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, and a source familiar with the investigation told the New York Post that Omar is not her real last name and that she was born with the last name Elmi.
Omar has pushed back hard. In a response to Fox News Digital, she stated her real name is “Ilhan Adbullahi Omar” after the filing used the Elmi moniker. She has called the long-running claim that she married her brother a “disgusting lie.”
In her first major television interview since the search, Omar sat down with MSNOW’s Chris Hayes. Hayes pressed her on the brother allegation that first circulated on a Somali blog and later among conservative activists in Minneapolis.
“You were not related to him at all? There’s not a weird kernel of truth...” Hayes asked. Omar answered, “Not to my knowledge.”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Trump seized on that phrasing at the White House South Lawn on Thursday. “Well, if you asked me that same question about, let’s say, my sister, I would say ‘no.’ She said ‘not to my knowledge.’ That tells you a lot right there,” he said. Days earlier he had warned, “She could go to jail,” and noted that “they keep talking about deportation.”
Breitbart reported Trump’s full demand that Speaker Johnson be told the seat is already gone because of the alleged false name used at her swearing-in. Omar’s camp has framed the entire investigation as politically driven. She told Hayes agents “had to do something... to say, hey, look, we raided her house,” and argued opponents want her forced from office because of her background and faith.
She also said her late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, naturalized in 2000, and that she obtained citizenship at 17 through him. Investigators have focused on documents he completed. “It’s also very convenient because my dad is no longer alive,” Omar said. “So it’s another thing they can drag on forever.”
The D.C. raid and follow-on steps have kept pressure high. Investigators questioned Omar’s sister after the home search, extending the inquiry into family circles already touched by grand jury subpoenas.
Omar described waking to agents “pounding on the doors” after only two and a half hours of sleep. “I thought something was on fire. I thought something was happening to the neighbors,” she said. She now plans to leave the D.C. residence, citing privacy, security, and death threats after the address became public. “I can’t continue to live there,” she told Hayes.
Federal agents seized phones and other devices during the October 12 operation, a step detailed when agents took Omar’s phone in the immigration fraud raid. Omar has insisted she lives a modest life, a 2016 Toyota Camry as the family’s only car, four kids, rented homes in D.C. and Minneapolis, and a “paycheck to paycheck” existence, even as congressional disclosures once appeared to value business interests tied to her husband, Tim Mynett, near $30 million before a sharp downward revision to roughly $20,000 in liabilities.
Border officials have already floated heavier consequences. Border czar Homan has said a strong case could strip Omar of citizenship if immigration fraud is proven. That remains a prospective claim, not a completed action.
Omar married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 and divorced him in 2017. She maintains the marriage was lawful and unrelated by blood. Trump and critics treat the shared “Nur Said Elmi” construction in the DOJ filing as proof she entered Congress under a false identity. Omar’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest Trump remarks.
The original federal search of Omar’s D.C. home launched a rolling fight over paperwork, citizenship, and whether a sitting member of Congress can be removed short of expulsion or a criminal conviction. Trump’s Iowa speech and Truth Social post raised the stakes by treating the alternate name in the filing as automatic disqualification.
Omar has said she will not be driven out. She has called the brother claim “insane” and traced it to an old Somali blog that “right wing conspiracy theorists in Minneapolis got a hold of.” Hayes noted that right-wing critics still believe the man was her brother; she rejects that outright.
Trump, for his part, has never hidden his view. “I don’t think it’s looking too good. Republicans have just picked up a seat in the House,” he told the Sioux City crowd. He has also said he has “never been a big fan of hers.” The filing, the search, the subpoenas, and her careful “not to my knowledge” answer are now the public record he is using to press the resignation demand.
Whether any court or House proceeding ever treats the Elmi designation as grounds to vacate a seat is still an open legal question. What is not open is the political reality: a sitting president is telling a Democratic congresswoman the name on a Justice Department filing ends her service, and she is answering that the whole effort is a campaign to force her out.
Voters expect members of Congress to answer basic questions about identity and immigration history with clarity, not hedging. When the paperwork and the sworn testimony do not line up cleanly, the burden sits with the official who wants to keep the seat.