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The Trump administration is working to build a case against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) with the hopes of ultimately denaturalizing and deporting the progressive Somali American lawmaker, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The alarming, unprecedented effort — denounced as outright fascism by critics — is wide-ranging, encompassing several federal agencies. U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the investigation told the Journal that the effort is focused, in part, on unearthing information about her deceased father, the circumstances surrounding her arrival in the U.S. when she was a child, and her citizenship.

The Justice Department has issued over a dozen subpoenas in relation to the investigation to Omar’s family, including to her sister and other relatives. The New York Times reported this week that federal officials are attempting to establish a case that Omar’s father lied or omitted information on his immigration forms when he came to the U.S. with Omar in 1995.

Other reports also say that the Trump administration is also looking into whether she lied on papers to obtain legal status and citizenship, and specifically on whether she or her father intentionally misstated her birthdate to obtain citizenship as a minor alongside her father when she was naturalized. The Department of Homeland Security looked into similar allegations of immigration fraud years ago, but did not move forward because of a lack of evidence.

In a drastic escalation on Monday, agents from Homeland Security Investigations conducted a predawn raid on Omar’s house in Washington, D.C. Officers seized her phone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport.

“President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress. There is no basis for this,” Omar told the Journal.

Omar was 12 years old when she arrived as a refugee in the U.S. Her family had fled a bloody civil war and a “human rights disaster,” as dubbed by Amnesty International, in Somalia. She became a U.S. citizen at the age of 17, in the year 2000.

Omar has weathered racist and bigoted personal attacks against her by President Donald Trump and other political figures for years. The Trump administration’s latest attacks on the Minnesota representative have been widely condemned by Democrats as a naked attempt to go after a political opponent just weeks before the midterm elections, in which Omar is up for reelection; as well as a tyrannical, fascist act by the increasingly bold and out-of-control Trump administration.

The allegation that Omar was actually 18 when she was naturalized originally gained traction on conservative social media through a viral video posted in 2019. Her congressional office had her birth year changed on official paperwork from 1981 to 1982, which conservative conspiracy theorists framed as suspicious.

However, her office said it was already in the process of getting her biographical information changed through official channels. Further, it is common for people from war-torn and underresourced countries to put an approximate date on immigration paperwork because they have no official record of their births; a 2020 report found only 6 percent of births are registered with the government in Somalia.

After the raid on Monday, Trump once again spewed racist rhetoric against Omar and Somalis.

“She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military, where all they do is shoot each other, and she comes into our country and she says, ‘I have a constitutional right,’” Trump said at a rally in Ohio. “She’s telling us about the Constitution, and she comes from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet.”

The crowd chanted “deport” as he incited violence against Somalis. Just last Friday, Trump openly encouraged a race war against Somalis in Minnesota in a post on Truth Social, telling followers to “fight back.”

Omar has stood up against Trump’s attacks. “Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement,” said Omar on Monday following the raid. “For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.”

The lawmaker is left-leaning and has been a consistent advocate for Palestinian rights, especially amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In 2025, she marked her 30th year in the U.S., and recalled the story about her family’s arrival in the U.S. She said that her grandfather was a major catalyst for their immigration.

“He wanted to come to the United States because, he said, the United States is where you can eventually become American,” she told The Nation last year. “As somebody who was born into colonized Somalia, and lived through dictatorship, and never really got to fully experience democracy, he was very eager to live in what he called ‘a true democracy.’”