Can Trump Revoke Ilhan Omar's Citizenship? Here's How the Process Works

Legal and immigration experts tell TIME that denaturalizing a U.S. citizen is a rare and difficult process.

In a highly unusual move, federal agents this week intensified their investigation into Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, weeks before he ran for re-election in his home district.

According to the New York Times, on Tuesday, the Ministry of Justice summoned the relatives of Omar's family, including his sister Sahra Noor. The grand jury subpoena was issued shortly after the lawmaker's residence in Washington, D.C., was raided on Monday.

The judicial search warrant, which is sealed, was executed by Internal Security Investigations, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's investigative branch. Although the Justice Department did not provide further details of the investigation, multiple media outlets reported, citing unnamed sources, that the search stemmed from Omar's immigration documents filled out by his late father when he was a child.

Prior to the investigation, several Trump administration officials had accused Omar of immigration fraud without providing any evidence. In a March podcast interview, Vice President J.J. Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Marquin Mullin said the investigation into Omar was "ongoing" and dismissed efforts to frame the case as political vendetta.

"If we actually move a case forward, it's not a political case. It's actually a case because they did something wrong," Mullin said in an interview with the right-wing Benny Johnson podcast.

Omar, who has long denied the allegations, condemned the raid on his home as "political intimidation" and said he "will not be silenced".

President Trump, along with many MAGA Republicans, has repeatedly floated the idea of ​​revoking Omar's citizenship, a process also known as denaturalization, and deporting him.

But legal and immigration experts tell TIME that denaturalizing a U.S. citizen is a rare and difficult process, one that requires federal officials to clear a high hurdle before a federal judge. Here's what you need to know about how the process works.

Stripping an individual of citizenship is a more difficult legal process than other immigration efforts that involve the courts. For example, deportation proceedings are initiated by ICE agents under the Department of Homeland Security and then approved by immigration judges who are employed by the Department of Justice. On the other hand, the naturalization process must be approved by an independent federal judge who evaluates the application to a higher standard.

All denaturalization efforts begin at the DOJ. To revoke a naturalized person's citizenship, a DOJ attorney must decide whether to file a civil or criminal lawsuit in court. A civil lawsuit does not have a statute of limitations, while a criminal lawsuit has a 10-year statute of limitations and must clear a much higher legal bar, said Euripzi Morgan, an attorney and host of the Free Range National podcast.

"For civil denaturalization, the government must show that there is clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence that the individual either unlawfully obtained his or her citizenship or willfully misrepresented a material fact," Morgan said. He emphasized that having a mistake on an immigration document does not mean that a judge will approve the removal of a person's citizenship.

For a criminal naturalization conviction, the federal government must show "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" that the person knowingly obtained their citizenship through fraud, which is the highest statutory standard of proof required to warrant a criminal conviction. In 2017, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Maslenjak v. United States that only an illegal act involved in a person's citizenship application can result in criminal illegality, narrowing the scope of such efforts.

Omar's father filled and sent his citizenship application on his behalf at the age of 17. It is unclear what, if any, evidence the federal government has to show that anything on the application was fraudulent, or that Omar or his father intentionally misrepresented anything on the application.

Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that deportation is not guaranteed even after a person is denaturalized. The individual will still be able to maintain their previous legal immigration status until the individual is issued a final order of removal by ICE.

"If they had a green card before naturalization, even after denaturalization, they will have a green card," Arthur said.

How did Representative Omar become a naturalized US citizen?

According to Omar Khan's biography, Omar and his family fled their home country of Somalia at the age of eight. The family finally applied for asylum in the United States in 1995. He became a US citizen in 2000 when he was 17, he told The New York Times.

At the time Omar went through the process, federal law allowed immigrants under the age of 18 to obtain U.S. citizenship if both parents had become U.S. citizens. This law was eventually replaced by a new law in 2001, which requires only one parent to become a citizen for children to become citizens.

At the center of the investigation is whether Omar's father, Noor Omar Muhammad, lied about his age on immigration documents so he could obtain citizenship through him, the Washington Post reported, citing two anonymous sources.

According to former immigration judge Arthur, if Omar was 18 when he applied for citizenship, he could apply for citizenship on his own after five years of having a valid green card.

The allegations related to Omar's citizenship have attracted attention among conservative activists and commentators since 2019. Omar became a member of Congress. Shortly after his election, Omar's staff sought to change his official birth year in public records from 1981 to 1982, according to multiple media outlets.

How often does the US government revoke people's citizenship?

Despite the renewed push from the second Trump administration, denaturalization is a rare legal process. According to the Immigration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, an average of 11 naturalization cases were filed annually between 1990 and 2017.

Denaturalization efforts have increased in Trump's second term. The Ministry of Justice has announced efforts to strip citizenship of at least 108 people in 2026. That's still significantly less than the hundreds of thousands of people the US government naturalizes each year.