Before dawn last Monday, agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of ICE, entered the Washington home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with a search warrant. They left with her phone, computers, notebooks, and passport. Only she and her husband were in the house. The Justice Department confirmed a court-authorized search in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation and said nothing more. Omar is up for reelection in three weeks.
Search warrants have been served on members of Congress before, usually in corruption cases. Those inclined to minimize what happened to Omar will point to them. But the comparison is a false one. Search warrants involving elected lawmakers can be, and often are, part of the regular, lawful process for investigating felonies such as bribery. This instance is fundamentally different because it represents a dangerous attempt to manipulate the legislature’s qualification rules to oust a congresswoman whom Donald Trump dislikes.
A Pretext for Denaturalization
To start with, the investigation exists because the president has singled out a member of Congress as part of a broader and explicitly racist campaign against Americans of a particular ethnic origin. There is no other way to put it. Last November, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalis in Minnesota, declared that Somali gangs were “roving the streets looking for ‘prey,’” and vowed to send Somalis “back to where they came from.”
In December, he told a Cabinet meeting that Somali immigrants were “garbage,” that Somalia was “barely a country,” and that “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.” He has posted that she “should be in jail” and “sent back to Somalia.” At the same time, Haitians, whom the president himself accused of eating pets during his campaign, are being stripped of TPS and deported.
Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host Trump appointed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, where the raid was conducted, once mused whether Omar’s hijab showed fealty to Sharia law over the Constitution. The remark was so egregious that Fox disavowed it and publicly reprimanded her.
The great majority of Minnesota’s Somali community immigrated legally and have become American citizens, or else were born here as citizens.
Trump’s hateful screeds against Somali Americans are not a matter of dog whistles or subtly implied bigotry. This is overt, explicit, virulent racism, without any attempt to pretend otherwise. His obsession with attacking Omar is inseparable from that context.
In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told an audience that Omar had “married her brother” and that if the government could prove it, “we’ll deport you.” Border czar Tom Homan confirmed days later that HSI had opened a criminal investigation. Grand jury subpoenas went out to her relatives, including her sister—meaning the administration is targeting not only her but her extended family. The raid followed. That same evening, when Trump brought her up at a rally in Ohio, the crowd chanted “deport!” The hostility came long before the investigation, and an investigation was found to fit it.
The investigation’s guiding theory seems to be that Omar’s late father lied that she was 17 instead of 18 when he filed her naturalization papers in 2000 so that she could obtain her citizenship without having to apply separately as an adult. Children under 18 become citizens automatically when a parent naturalizes; adults have to apply on their own. HSI looked at the same allegation under the Biden administration and dropped it for want of any evidence of fraud. DOJ also looked into Omar during Trump’s first term and declined to pursue a full investigation because of insufficient evidence.
Even granting the suspicion some factual basis—and there is none—no evidence of a long-ago paperwork discrepancy was going to turn up in a congresswoman’s townhouse a quarter century later. The government already holds every form she or her father ever submitted.
DOJ claims that its warrant was for a criminal investigation. But the statute of limitations for naturalization fraud is 10 years from the date citizenship was obtained, which in Omar’s case ran out in 2010. And her father, who actually filed the forms in question, is dead. A criminal charge would therefore have to rest on something Omar herself did more recently, such as a false statement on a later passport application or other form, and prosecutors have not said what that would be.
But the purpose of the criminal investigation may not be to pursue criminal charges against her. Rather, it may be a way to advance a civil lawsuit under the denaturalization statute to revoke citizenship. It’s a rarely used law, most famously applied to eject war criminals who had lied about their past. A civil denaturalization suit has no statute of limitations, no jury, and no requirement of a prior conviction. The government still has to prove the original fraud, but it gets to do so in a civil suit, under a lower standard of proof, decades after the fact.
The Wall Street Journal reported, citing administration officials and others familiar with the investigation, that the aim is to build a case to strip Omar of her citizenship and then deport her. She would become the most prominent target of a denaturalization drive that has already produced more than 200 lawsuits since Trump returned to office. The criminal investigation is the pretext that gets a search warrant signed; denaturalization and removal are the goal.
The predawn entry by armed agents into a family’s home may or may not yield evidence of a crime allegedly committed decades ago, but it is a show of force. The administration went out of its way to do it this way, and the only purpose that serves is to intimidate a political opponent.
The raid also sets aside a norm DOJ has maintained for decades. The department’s longstanding practice has been to avoid overt investigative steps against candidates in the roughly 60 days before an election, especially when waiting would not jeopardize the investigation. Searching a candidate’s home three weeks before she stands for reelection is about the clearest example of what the practice exists to prevent. Trump and his lawyers, several of whom now run the department, loudly invoked the same rule in 2024 against the prosecution of Trump himself.
What the House Alone May Judge
All of that would be bad enough if Omar were a private citizen. That she is a member of Congress matters, and it matters in a specific constitutional way that has so far gone mostly unremarked.
Article I, Section 5 provides that each house “shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” The qualifications themselves are fixed earlier in Article I: a representative must be at least 25, must have been a citizen for seven years, and must inhabit the state she represents. Whether a seated member meets those three qualifications is for the House to decide, and not for the president, DOJ, or a district court hearing a civil suit the executive branch has brought.
The administration has not disputed that only the House can make this determination, and for now it does not need to. Its strategy is to change the facts the House would be judging rather than to contest who gets to judge them: make her a non-citizen first, then hand the House the result and demand it comply.
The Framers embraced this rule for structural reasons. A legislature exists to check the other branches, and it cannot do so if one of those branches gets to decide who sits in it. An executive able to remove his critics from the chamber, or to decide which of them were ever entitled to be there, would not face a legislature at all, only a body whose membership he had selected.
The same section of the Constitution gives each house control over its own rules, its own discipline, and expulsion of its own members, and the next section shields members from being questioned anywhere else for what they say in debate. The judgment of qualifications sits among those provisions because it serves the same end. The members answer to their constituents and to their colleagues, and to nobody else.
The House’s control over its own membership does not put members beyond the reach of the ordinary law. A representative who takes a bribe can be investigated, indicted, and convicted like anyone else, and nothing in Article I stands in the way. A conviction is not among the qualifications and does not by itself cost anyone a seat. What is different about the Omar investigation is its purpose. It is not aimed at punishing a crime but at taking away one of the three constitutional qualifications for the office she already holds, her citizenship.
The courts have treated the judging of qualifications as the House’s power to exercise, not theirs to review. When a house decides a contested election or a member’s qualifications, that decision is final, one of the few places where the Constitution makes a branch other than the judiciary the last word on a legal question. Both the House and Senate have considered and decided such disputes, including citizenship qualifications.
A denaturalization campaign against a sitting member is an attempt to get around that power first, and to contest it once the House has been presented with a result. The administration cannot expel Omar from Congress; that takes a two-thirds vote of the House. It cannot refuse to seat her; the House also has the sole power over that. What it can attempt is to go to court, obtain a judgment that her citizenship was procured by fraud, and then declare that she no longer satisfies the citizenship qualification and has to go. Every step in that sequence takes place outside the House. The chamber the Constitution makes the sole judge of its members’ qualifications would be handed a result and told the matter had already been settled elsewhere.
That assumption is already being made on the administration’s behalf. Ilya Shapiro of the right-wing Manhattan Institute told the Daily Caller that if Omar were denaturalized she “wouldn’t be able to serve in Congress and would likely have to leave the country.” He skips the step that matters. A court can rule on her naturalization. It cannot say whether she sits in the House. A civil judgment revoking naturalization is a judgment about immigration status, and nothing in it binds the House on the separate question the Constitution reserves to it, whether she is qualified to keep her seat. The House could examine a denaturalization order obtained by this process, for this purpose, and judge that its duly elected and already seated member remains qualified to serve. That she remains a member is the status quo unless and until the House says otherwise.
The House may have ultimate control over its membership, but the attempt to short-circuit that authority by abusing other processes does real damage. The House would keep its power on paper while being dared to assert it, and to assert her privileges as a member in full standing. That power would not be taken away so much as made beside the point, because the administration would already have decided the question the House is supposed to answer: whether she is a citizen. If the House declined to go along, there is every reason to expect the administration would insist and try to deport her anyway, and the indirect route would become a direct confrontation.
None of this turns on the technicality that the House could decline to go along. Suppose a member really had lied about a disqualifying past on her naturalization papers, a war criminal, say, who had concealed it to get in. That is the charitable hypothetical. DOJ should still follow proper process, free from political interference and partisan bias, including overt racial and religious animus. A more normal DOJ would proceed cautiously, observing the traditional norms to avoid the appearance of interfering in an ongoing election or challenging the House’s own constitutional powers in this area. The Department also knows how to work with Congress when the two are potentially running parallel investigations, or when they have overlapping responsibilities for a topic. This is an expected level of inter-branch comity and cooperation completely absent here.
The actual case is an investigation that began with the president’s public contempt for a member and for the ethnic community she belongs to, built on a claim two earlier reviews found baseless, and pursued with the reported aim of having a court declare a sitting member of Congress a non-citizen and potentially putting her out of the country while she still holds her seat. There is no version of that which avoids a constitutional crisis.
Nor could the administration simply arrest her without violating the Constitution. Until the House says otherwise, she remains a member, and Article I, Section 6 protects members from arrest while Congress is in session and while going to and returning from it, in all cases except treason, felony, and breach of the peace. Normally those exceptions are so broad the protection has little practical effect. But immigration detention and removal are civil proceedings, not criminal ones, and fall under none of the exceptions. An ICE officer who arrested a sitting congresswoman on her way to the Capitol would be doing precisely what that clause was written to prevent.
Reaching Past Congress
There is no reason to suppose Omar will be the last. An executive that can manufacture a disqualification for one member can do it for others, and she is far from the only naturalized citizen in Congress (currently there are 17 in the House and two in the Senate). A president willing to do this three weeks before an election is not going to stop at one.
The pattern is familiar from elsewhere. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega first had his electoral council remove 28 deputies from the National Assembly, then in 2023 had a court strip the citizenship of more than 300 opponents, many of them put on a plane and declared traitors. In Russia, the Duma expelled the opposition deputy Gennady Gudkov in 2012 on a pretext about his business dealings. In Hong Kong, Beijing reread the territory’s constitution, the Basic Law, to find that six elected legislators had taken their oaths improperly and so forfeited their seats, then in 2020 disqualified four more by decree. It’s a familiar authoritarian playbook.
What separates the campaign against Omar from the ordinary run of abuses is that it is aimed at the one body with the constitutional means to hold the president to account. Congress can investigate him, subpoena his officials, cut off his funding, and impeach and remove him. An executive that can threaten individual legislators with the loss of their citizenship and their country has found a way to reach past Congress as an institution and into the personal security of the people who make it up.
What one thinks of Omar’s politics has no bearing on any of this. The objection would be identical if the target were a member of the other party.
Our republic has been in an accelerating state of constitutional collapse for some time. But manufacturing grounds to unseat a member of Congress is still a serious escalation and shouldn’t be set aside as merely another Trump effort to punish his critics. It is an attack on the core load-bearing constitutional structure.
Deep Cuts is a weekly column by Andy Craig exploring the constitutional, philosophical, and historical roots of current events and the ongoing crisis of American democracy. To read past entries, go here.
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