US authorities conducted a predawn raid on the Washington-area home of Democratic US Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
According to Reuters, the Department said on Monday, October 12, that the raid on the outspoken critic of US President Donald Trump, who has been the target of political insults by the Republican president, was part of an ongoing investigation.
A person familiar with the investigation said it is related to alleged immigration fraud, and part of the probe concerns the Somali-born lawmaker's immigration paperwork, which was filled out by her late father when she was a child.
"Today in the Washington, DC area, Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice. This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal investigation," a Justice Department spokesperson said in an email.
Who is Ilhan Omar?
Omar was born the youngest of seven siblings in Somalia's capital Mogadishu in 1981. Her mother died when she was two years old, BBC reported.
Raised by her father and grandfather, the family fled the country during the Somali Civil War and spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp before moving to the US in 1995.
Originally working in education, she began her political career managing city council campaigns and working as a senior policy aide for Minnesota politicians.
In 2016 she won election to the state's legislature - unseating a 44-year incumbent in the process.
Omar told the BBC in a 2017 interview that young people who "believed more in my platform, my ideas, and the merit of what I stood for" drove her to run.
"A lot of the elders and mainly the women in the community thought it would be better... if I took a back seat," she said.
In 2018, she became the first African refugee to become a Member of Congress, the first woman of color to represent Minnesota, and one of the first two Muslim-American women elected to Congress.
Omar was reelected to her fourth term in Congress after beating Republican Dalia al-Aqidi by more than 50 percentage points.
