Vice President JD Vance denied having advance notice of the Monday morning raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) Washington, D.C., home.
While speaking to reporters on the tarmac before boarding a plane to Texas, Vance said he and President Donald Trump try to stay out of such affairs.
“I did not have advance notice her home was being raided,” Vance said. “I never — we try to run our Department of Justice in a fair and honest way. We try to let the law follow the facts rather than creating facts just to prosecute people we don’t like.”
“And because of that, I think the president and I largely try to stay out of Department of Justice investigations and other prosecutions. Now, I do know that there are some serious allegations against Ilhan Omar. We’re going to look into those, and again, if there is a real case there, we’re gonna follow the facts. If there’s not a real case there, then we won’t,” Vance added.
Vance’s comments came after Omar claimed she was “targeted” by the Trump administration.
“Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. 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,” Omar wrote on X hours after the raid.
“I will not be silenced,” she added.
Omar’s congressional office also called the raid “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.”
“For a decade, Donald Trump has relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with inflammatory rhetoric, repeatedly putting a target on her back,” her office said. “Now, those attacks have escalated to a pointless federal raid. The Congresswoman has done nothing wrong. No president should be able to use the power of the federal government to intimidate his political enemies.”
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents carried out the raid as part of an investigation into immigration documents completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child, Fox News reported.
The federal agents, who are part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), executed a court-authorized search warrant, the Justice Department said.
Photo by Andrew Leyden/Getty Images
Omar came to the United States in 1995 as a child refugee from war-torn Somalia. She became an American citizen in 2000.
In 2009, Omar married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen some critics allege is her biological brother. The couple reportedly split in 2011 and finalized their divorce in 2017.
White House border czar Tom Homan confirmed last month that ICE opened an investigation into allegations that Omar married her brother as part of an alleged immigration fraud scheme.
“I mean, if someone committed [an] immigration violation and someone committed marriage fraud or anything like that, regardless if they’re a congresswoman or not, no one’s above the law, so I’ll leave it at that. We’ll let HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, continue the investigation,” Homan said.
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