WASHINGTON (Oct. 20, 2026) — Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the Justice Department’s search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home was “a fascistic attempt to denaturalize & deport her.” He wrote that “failure to call this for what it is, is complicity.”
What He Said
His full post, published at 3:56 p.m. on Oct. 20, 2026, read:
“Eight days ago, less than a month before an election, Trump’s DOJ raided @Ilhan’s home in what we know is a fascistic attempt to denaturalize & deport her.
We cannot become numb to these blatant abuses of power. Failure to call this for what it is, is complicity.”
The Raid
The Justice Department said Homeland Security Investigations “executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice” at Omar’s Washington-area home on Oct. 12. The search came 22 days before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, in which Omar is on the ballot.
The Article He Linked
Van Hollen linked an Oct. 13 Washington Post report. It said the investigation centers on claims that Omar or her late father may have lied on decades-old immigration paperwork to secure legal status and eventually citizenship. Three people familiar with the matter described the probe to the paper.
The report said investigators are focused on whether Omar or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, intentionally misstated her birth date. That would have made her eligible to derive citizenship through him when he was naturalized in 2000. The report said Homeland Security Investigations had declined to pursue a similar probe years earlier, and that the search warrant listed potential charges of conspiracy, immigration fraud and false statements.
The report said some members of Omar’s family received grand jury subpoenas. It also noted that it is “extremely unusual” for federal agents to take public investigative steps involving a member of Congress weeks before an election. No criminal charges against Omar have been announced.
Omar and the Administration Respond
Omar has repeatedly rejected the allegations and called them “baseless lies and smear campaigns.” In a post on X she wrote: “Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the investigation, Reuters reported. The spokesperson said citizenship “must be obtained lawfully and honestly” and that the administration would investigate any case where the facts support denaturalization. Trump told reporters he had “nothing to do” with the probe but called Omar “totally crooked personally.”
The Denaturalization Numbers
The Post reported that the Justice Department has filed at least 163 denaturalization cases since January 2025, including 40 since August. By comparison, the average was about 11 per year from 1990 to 2017, per a Migration Policy Institute analysis. The report said such cases have rarely reached decades-old conduct outside of serious transnational crimes such as war crimes or genocide.
The Democracy Defenders Fund filed a Hatch Act complaint over the timing of the raid. The group’s executive chairman, Norm Eisen, wrote that the decision to carry it out “at this very moment” was “unexplainable” except as a politically motivated use of power.
Van Hollen’s Record on DOJ
Van Hollen is the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that funds the Justice Department and FBI. In a letter with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, he described an “unprecedented political purge of career Department of Justice (DOJ) employees.” The senators demanded the officials halt efforts “to fulfill President Trump’s partisan political revenge agenda.”
In a separate letter, Van Hollen led Democratic appropriators in pressing Bondi over DOJ’s actions toward FBI agents who worked on the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack investigations. The senators said they were “outraged at such an unprecedented and blatantly retaliatory decision.”
Democratic Leaders React
House Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar called the raid “deeply disturbing.” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said Democrats would demand to know who authorized and carried out the search.