The Trump administration has desperately searched for evidence that Rep. Ilhan Omar committed fraud, alleging she or her late father are liars for changing her age from 18 to 17 years old on her citizenship application. According to what US officials and other people with knowledge of the federal government’s investigation told the Wall Street Journal, the goal is to construct a case to strip the Minnesota congresswoman of her American citizenship and deport her from the US. Omar became a US citizen in 2000, five years after arriving from a refugee camp in Kenya after she and her family fled the Somali Civil War. Early Monday morning, the Journal reported, Homeland Security agents took Omar’s phone, notebooks, personal computers, and her passport during the raid on her DC home. Authorities have also reportedly handed out more than a dozen subpoenas, which the New York Times wrote Wednesday include Sahra Noor, Omar’s sister, and “at least one other member of her family circle.  On Monday evening, the crowd at an Ohio Republican rally chanted “deport” as President Donald Trump yet again hurled racist rhetoric at Omar, people from Somalia living in Minnesota—whom he called “Somali bandits”—and Michigan Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed (Trump called him “a jihadist”).  On Tuesday, the president suggested on Truth Social that Omar had also committed financial fraud: “Could it be that her highly paid accountant actually reported the money that was stolen from her fraudulent account activities in Minnesota?” The same day, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney in Washington, said she is looking into Omar’s financial disclosures.  “There are several investigations going on,” she said Tuesday on Fox News. “If there was a crime that was committed, it will be prosecuted.” The US attorney also asserted it “doesn’t matter” that a nonpartisan, independent body found Omar blameless of wrongdoing and recommended the House Ethics Committee withdraw misconduct allegations when she substantially overstated her wealth in documents she submitted to Congress. All of this is happening just three weeks before the November midterms, in which Omar is favored to win reelection.

My heart was in my throat as I watched the video emerging late Tuesday. A disturbed, angry man had just rushed Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar during a town hall in Minneapolis and assaulted her. He sprayed her in the chest with vinegar from a syringe, then was tackled by security and arrested. Omar reacted defiantly, kept her cool and carried on with the event. She was quickly hailed for her fortitude. All I could think was, thank God she’s not dead. Initial media coverage referred to the attack by 55-year-old suspect Anthony Kazmierczak as “bizarre,” but it is worse than that. In more than a decade of reporting on violence prevention, I’ve studied many stalking cases and assassinations and the recognizable behaviors that precede them: the stewing grievances and desperation, the preparation, the final moment of action. The next assailant will just as easily have a knife or a gun. In this era of surging political violence, even worse yet was the reaction from the president of the United States. ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott asked Donald Trump on Tuesday night if he’d seen the video. His response was to disparage Omar as “a fraud” and suggest the attack was staged: “She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.” (There is zero evidence of that, and the perpetrator appears to have shared Trump’s acrimonious views of Omar.) America has felt on a precipice this cold January. Minneapolis has been ground zero, culminating with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by masked men carrying out Trump’s mass deportation operations. Minnesotans have mounted an inspired campaign of mutual aid and constitutionally protected protest. A growing majority of Americans are with them.  > Trump’s rhetoric may sound ignorant and unhinged, but more importantly, it is > calculated. But Trump continues to direct contempt and rage at immigrants in so-called blue cities—and at Omar, long a top target of his vitriol. Last November, he responded to an unrelated terrorist attack on National Guard soldiers in the nation’s capital by railing against “hundreds of thousands of Somalians” in Minnesota, claiming they “are ripping off our country and ripping apart that once great state.” Days later, he called Omar, who is Somali American, and her community “garbage” during a live-broadcast cabinet meeting. As Trump declared they should “go back to where they came from,” many in the room applauded and Vice President JD Vance pounded the table enthusiastically. Trump was at it again in the very hours before Kazmierczak assaulted Omar. During a speech in Iowa on Tuesday, Trump said Omar exemplified immigrants who “hate our country.” Those who want to stay here, he said, “have to show that they’re not going to blow up our shopping centers, blow up our farms, kill people.” That may sound ignorant and unhinged, and it is those things—but more importantly, it is calculated. Trump made anti-immigrant demagoguery the core of his 2024 reelection campaign, and he has exploited political violence throughout his first year back in office, as I documented recently. He does so, political historian Matt Dallek told me, to rile up his base and further justify his extreme policies, including the violent and lawless actions of ICE: “The narrative he creates says to all his supporters that what he’s doing is ‘destroying the enemy within,’ that he’s taking care of the scourge that he promised to address. I think it’s a mistake to discount just how powerful that can be.” Powerful politically—and unpredictable as to where and when it will unleash more violence. That also has been a hallmark of Trump’s political career: stochastic terrorism, a tactic of incitement that allows room for deniability but makes violent attacks more likely. We don’t yet know much about Kazmierczak’s motive. (As of late Wednesday, the FBI had taken over the investigation, and it was unclear whether Kazmierczak yet had any legal representation.) But we do know, according to media reporting and interviews with his brother, that he was a right-wing Trump supporter with a long history of mental health problems and “a hatred of the Somali community.” Minnesota was the site of another grim example last summer, when a pro-Trump extremist hunted two Democratic state lawmakers at their homes, fatally shooting former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and wounding Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. Trump’s response to that horror was no less appalling. A new report from the US Capitol Police, released coincidentally on Tuesday, shows that threats against members of Congress have continued to soar. In 2025, the agency’s threat assessment section investigated nearly 15,000 “concerning statements, behaviors, and communications” targeting federal lawmakers, a more than 50 percent increase from the prior year. > GOP lawmakers “know how much worse his rhetoric has made things,” said a > federal law enforcement source. Omar has long faced a deluge of threats and has sometimes been assigned a 24-hour security detail from the Capitol Police, according to the New York Times. That added protection is at the discretion of the House speaker, but for the past year Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has not offered it to Omar, the Times reported. After the attack on Tuesday, Omar made a formal request for extra protection and Johnson agreed, the Times noted. A federal law enforcement source familiar with Capitol Police operations told me that, as a matter of close protection, the attack on Omar was a catastrophic failure with an “extremely lucky” outcome. Even though Omar reportedly will now have additional security, the Capitol Police have been heavily strained on this front. Moreover, lawmakers from Trump’s party “know how much worse his rhetoric has made things,” said the source, who has direct knowledge of conversations in which some lawmakers have admitted that “they can’t or won’t go against” Trump, because they fear for their political standing or the safety of their families. Several Republicans who have quit Congress in recent years have cited such reasons, including former Trump devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene. The role of politics or ideology in an attack is often murky, the source emphasized. But the danger manifest again on Tuesday remains high, especially with Republican leaders cowing to Trump’s unrelenting politics of fear and contempt. “What does that mean for those individuals out there who are brittle, are in a tough place in life and have a lot of anger?” the source said. “Silence in the face of this can also be taken as permission.”

After Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was attacked at a Minneapolis town hall on Tuesday night and sprayed with an unknown substance from a syringe, President Donald Trump suggested that she may have orchestrated the incident.  “No. I don’t think about her. I think she’s a fraud. I really don’t think about that,” Trump said when asked if he had seen the video of the attack. “She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”  Oh, but he does think about her. The attack on Omar took place the same night Trump mentioned her while delivering a speech in Iowa ahead of this year’s midterm elections.  “We need people to come in legally, but they have to show that they can love our country—not hate our country,” Trump said Tuesday regarding immigration policy. “Not like Ilhan Omar.” He continued: “She comes from a country that’s a disaster… It’s not even a country, okay. It barely has a government. I don’t think it does. They’re good at one thing. Pirates.”  > Trump on Omar: "She's always talking about 'the Constitution provides me w/ > the following.' She comes from a country that's a disaster. It's not even a > country. They're good at one thing – pirates. But they don't do that anymore > bc they get same treatment from us as the drug dealers. Boom Boom Boom" > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-27T23:13:41.283Z Omar was born in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu and fled the country with her family during the Somali Civil War. She spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before moving to the US in 1995. Omar and her family eventually settled in Minnesota, home to the largest Somali communities in the country. Trump has targeted Somali immigrants since at least last November when he promised to end Temporary Protected Status for Somalis living in Minnesota, linking all communities to fraud in the state.  But Omar has continued to fight back. “ICE cannot be reformed, it cannot be rehabilitated, we must abolish ICE for good, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment,” Omar said during the Tuesday town hall, just before the man attacked her. She wound up to strike back at the man before he was subdued by security. Omar was not injured, and, later on Tuesday night, she wrote on X, “I’m ok. I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work.”  The man was arrested and booked at the county jail for third-degree assault, according to Minneapolis police spokesperson Trevor Folke. > Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) assaulted during town hall meeting: "Here's the reality > that people like this ugly man don't understand; we are Minnesota strong and > we will stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw at us." > pic.twitter.com/Ud5l3yP4lQ > > — CSPAN (@cspan) January 28, 2026 And Omar continued her speech after a short break. “I learned at a young age, you don’t give in to threats,” Omar told the audience. “You look them in the face and you stand strong.” The incident involving Omar isn’t the only recent example of heightened threats and attacks. A man allegedly assaulted Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fl.) last week. Frost said that the man punched him after saying that Trump would deport him.  And according to data from the US Capitol Police released on Tuesday, investigated threats—which include “concerning statements, behaviors, and communications directed against Members of Congress, their families, staff, and the Capitol Complex”—rose from 9,474 in 2024 to 14,938 in 2025.