Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota on Wednesday said that she cannot continue living in her Washington, D.C.-area home due to death threats and fears over her publicly available address, following the federal raid she accused the Trump administration of initiating to intimidate voters. "So have to figure out where to move to.” During the interview, Omar recounted waking up around 6 a.m. October 12 to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents pounding on the front and back doors of her home while she, her husband and their 20-year-old son were inside.
She described the raid as chaotic, saying her family scrambled to get dressed and downstairs as they tried to understand what was happening. And, you know, it obviously did freak all of us out,” she said. Omar said she had returned from traveling in the early morning hours and had been asleep for only a couple of hours when agents arrived.
She initially thought something was on fire. She estimated that 15 to 25 agents searched the house room by room, over four to five hours. Authorities took 17 items, she said, including an older phone, her daughter's first phone, a recently replaced phone, keepsakes, a camera dating to the 1960s, a Somali phrase book and notebooks.
She said she was unable to call her attorney until about an hour into the operation and spent that time sitting on the couch and staring at the warrant, which she said covered electronics. Omar described the search as intrusive but said the agents behaved in a “decent” manner. She also said they did a “really good job” of putting everything back in its place, even folding some of her clothes.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Omar’s office for comment. During the interview, Omar addressed long-running allegations that she married her brother, saying she was not aware of being related to her former husband. The congresswoman traced the rumor to a Somali blog post that she said right-wing conspiracy theorists in Minneapolis later picked up, pointing to “random people” who claimed she had introduced them to the man.
"They just kind of went and found random people who were like, 'she introduced us. She introduced him to us and said he was her brother,' which is, you know, insane. I mean, I don't know those people that they talk about," Omar said.
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