President Donald Trump on Tuesday declined to take a stance on calls to expel Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a day after federal agents raided her Washington, D.C., home.
“I think she’s a terrible person, I think she’s a terrible congresswoman, I think she doesn’t love our country at all, but I don’t take a position,” Trump told reporters before departing for a rally in Alaska.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) raided Omar’s Washington, D.C., home on Monday morning as part of an investigation into immigration documents her late father completed when she was a child, Fox News reported.
The Justice Department said agents executed a court-authorized search warrant.
Omar came to the United States as a child refugee from Somalia in 1995 and received U.S. citizenship in 2000.
After Monday’s raid, Omar posted on X that she was being “targeted” by the Trump administration for political reasons.
“I’m fine. Make no mistake: This is an attempt to target political opponents and weaponize federal law enforcement. For a decade, Trump has been targeting me with a campaign of baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation,” Omar wrote in an X post.
“I will not remain silent,” she added.
Vice President J.D. Vance later said he and the president were trying to “distance themselves” from the Justice Department investigation.
“I had no advance notice that her home was being searched,” Vance said. “I’ve never — we try to run our Department of Justice in a fair and honest way. We try to make the law follow the facts and not make things up just to prosecute people we don’t like.”
“Because of that, I think the president and I have largely tried to stay out of the Department of Justice’s investigations and other prosecutions. Now, I do know that there are some serious allegations against Ilhan Omar. We’re going to investigate those allegations and, again, if there’s a real case there, we’re going to follow the facts. If there’s not a real case there, then we’re not going to investigate,” he added.
Omar’s marital history has also come under scrutiny. In 2009, she married British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who some critics claim is her biological brother. The couple reportedly split in 2011 and divorced in 2017.
Trump has previously called for Omar to be deported.
After his State of the Union address in February, Trump wrote in The Truth Society that Omar and her far-left congressional colleague Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) would be “institutionalized” and sent back “where they came from.” The two congresswomen yelled at the president when he berated them for not standing up for him in his fight against illegal immigration.
“We should get them back from where they came as quickly as possible,” Trump said.
Last year, Trump said he “met with the leader of Somalia” and asked him to “bring her back.”
“He said I didn’t want her,” Trump seemed to joke.