Federal agents allegedly dug through Rep. Ilhan Omar’s trash for DNA days before searching her Washington home, as sources say the immigration case runs deeper than many realize.
Homeland Security Investigations agents searched the Minnesota Democrat’s Washington, D.C., home on Monday and walked out with her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport. Inside sources later described a quieter step that came first: agents going through her garbage in hopes of collecting DNA from Omar and her family.
Daily Mail reporting on those accounts ties the trash search to a wider immigration-fraud probe now coordinated by Homeland Security Investigations’ Minneapolis office, ICE’s investigative arm, and says the DNA was treated as critical evidence.
The raids landed just three weeks before her re-election bid. Sources also described more than a dozen other searches unfolding at the same time.
Sources told NewsNation the dumpster work happened days before the Monday home search. A former FBI special agent, Tracy Walder, told On Balance that discarded DNA can be a straightforward target when it sits in a public place.
Walder said:
"To me, if they are obviously trying to obtain DNA, then, yes, that is a very easy get, especially if it was discarded even in a trash can."
She added that agents generally do not need a warrant for that kind of collection if the material is already in public. She also noted investigators could be looking for many things in trash, not DNA alone.
The home entry itself was not a freelanced knock. A federal judge approved the raid after investigators presented messages from Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor. Noor’s phone had been seized earlier this year. The contents of those private messages have not been made public.
Federal prosecutors have also issued subpoenas naming other members of the family. Sources expect the evidence to go before a grand jury.
The probe, as sources describe it, focuses on how Omar obtained U.S. citizenship and on long-running claims about a 2009 marriage.
Authorities are seeking immigration records tied to whether Omar or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, changed her age on the citizenship application, listed as 17 rather than 18, when she became a citizen in 2000. Omar has said she became a citizen “before I turned 18” through her father’s naturalization, a point she made in September 2018.
Separate claims hold that she married Somali community leader Ahmed Elmi in 2009 to help him secure citizenship. Some have alleged Elmi is her brother. Omar has denied the marriage claims. President Donald Trump has repeated the accusation in public.
Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu questioned how DNA would fit a classic fraud case built on paperwork and status.
Wu said:
"If we’re looking at DNA, it’s like a whodunnit: \"Were they there?\" And it’s kind of hard to figure out how the fraud investigation would figure into that type of evidence."
That tension is real on the public record so far: sources call the DNA critical, while the known fraud theories still turn on age entries, family relationships, and citizenship history. Stripping citizenship would require the Justice Department to file a federal lawsuit and prove a material misrepresentation in obtaining it. No charges are described as filed in the available accounts.
Trump denied personal involvement in the raid and pointed the matter to the Justice Department.
He said:
"Well, I understand they’re looking at her very carefully. I’ve always found her to be totally crooked, personally, but that has nothing to do with me."
He went further in the same stretch of remarks, calling her “a terrible person” and “just a complainer,” and saying she came from “a non-country” before criticizing the Constitution here. He again said the case was “really up to the DOJ” and that he had “nothing to do with it.”
The same reporting notes the inquiry first moved under the Biden Justice Department, was closed, and was later revived and expanded under the Trump administration. Trump and his Homeland Security chief have also floated the idea of stripping citizenship in related public discussion.
Omar answered on X on Thursday. She framed the pressure as political from the start of her time in Congress.
She wrote that Trump and his administration “have been after me since I arrived in Congress,” that she has “always stood up to him and that will never change,” and added:
"The pedophile protector will never silence me."
She has described the search as a campaign of political intimidation. She is 44, has represented Minnesota since 2019, and is seeking a fifth term. She was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. Her family lived for a time in the Washington suburbs before Minnesota.
Sources placed the evidence-gathering wave only three weeks before her re-election bid and noted the Justice Department’s unwritten practice of avoiding election-season steps that could sway voters inside a 60-day window. Whether that practice binds this investigation is not settled in the public material.
What is clear is the scale sources describe: the Omar home search was not isolated. More than a dozen other raids ran in the same period. Targets, locations, and inventories from those other searches are not laid out in detail.
Also unknown: the precise statutes under review, any docket number, the full warrant affidavit text, which family members the subpoenas name, what the sister’s messages actually say, and whether a grand jury has already heard the evidence or only is expected to. Arrests are not reported. The passport and devices are in government hands. The DNA theory, the age records, and the old marriage claims are now part of the same public fight.
When a sitting member of Congress faces a judge-approved search, family subpoenas, and a DNA hunt in the alley trash, voters deserve the filings and the facts, not slogans from either side.
