President Trump said Rep. Ilhan Omar could go to jail or be deported over alleged citizenship fraud and branded the Minnesota Democrat “a disgrace to our country.”
Standing in the Oval Office on Tuesday, President Donald Trump answered a direct question about whether problems with Rep. Ilhan Omar’s age on immigration papers could lead to her removal from the United States. He did not stop at deportation.
Trump told reporters the Minnesota Democrat could face prison time as well, framed the comments as his own judgment, and called her conduct a stain on the country she now helps govern. The exchange came during an announcement on a fraud incentive program and landed amid an active federal probe into her citizenship history.
Fox News reported that FOX Business correspondent Edward Lawrence asked whether an age discrepancy could result in deportation. Trump’s reply was blunt.
"Well, she could be. She could also go to jail."
He pressed the point again.
"You know, they keep talking about deportation. No, she could go to jail."
Trump added, “This is just my opinion,” then went further on Omar’s record and posture toward the country that granted her a seat in Congress.
The president described Omar as “a very dishonest person” who “hates our country.” He said she arrived from abroad and now lectures Americans on how the nation should be run.
"Then she comes over here, and she says that she wants to tell us how to run America. She wants to tell us how to run the United States of America. She’s a disgrace to our country."
He closed that stretch by saying he hoped investigators would “treat her fairly.” No specific criminal charge was named in the Oval Office exchange, and Trump did not present new evidence on camera. The comments still marked a sharp escalation in how the White House is talking about the case.
Just the News reported Trump labeling Omar a sick, very dishonest person who hates the United States and tying the jail talk to alleged fraud on citizenship paperwork after her family’s arrival from Somalia in the late 1990s.
On Dec. 12, Trump had already told reporters Omar was “very bad for our country.” Tuesday’s remarks went further by putting prison in the same breath as removal.
The backdrop is not abstract. Federal agents searched Omar’s Washington, D.C., home on Oct. 12. They seized her cellphone and other possessions as part of an investigation into allegations involving her citizenship and birth-year representations on immigration paperwork.
That federal search of Omar’s D.C. residence put physical evidence collection at the center of a fight Democrats immediately cast as politics.
The core dispute, as described in the reporting, turns on whether Omar was still a minor when her father became a U.S. citizen in 2000, or whether she was already 18 and needed to apply on her own. Investigators are examining claims that her birth year was misrepresented so she could gain status through him.
Homeland Security’s move on the home, including the seizure of Omar’s cellphone in the raid, signaled the probe had moved past paper review into active evidence gathering.
The New York Post reported that Trump tied the jail threat to lying about her age after her birthdate was changed in public records following the 2018 election, and that the raid included boxes labeled as evidence. Omar has denied wrongdoing. Fox News Digital reached out to her office for comment.
White House border czar Tom Homan spoke Saturday on “The Big Weekend Show” and sketched the legal path without declaring a final outcome. If someone lies during naturalization, he said, the government has a process to strip citizenship. Officials have used it before.
"Of course, if you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody. We’ve done it before. And certainly, if the evidence points that way, that could happen."
Homan said he would not get ahead of the bureau or Homeland Security Investigations. He added he has been told they have a strong case and that the evidence should lead where it leads. Omar, he said, would face the same standards as anyone else.
That stance matches earlier reporting on how Homan outlined denaturalization and deportation if fraud is proven, process first, politics second, proof required.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and other Democrats denounced the investigation as political persecution aimed at a prominent Trump critic ahead of the midterms. That is their public frame. It does not erase the search warrant, the seized phone, or the citizenship paperwork questions now under review.
Trump did not limit himself to the legal mechanics. He questioned why a lawmaker who came from Somalia now instructs Americans on national policy, and he tied her political base to voters he said should not be in the country.
RealClearPolitics carried Trump’s fuller line that Omar comes from a country that is “essentially not even a country,” Somalia, which he called a “real s*** house,” and his claim that Somalis who vote for her mostly should not be here. He also said many in that community have extremely high unemployment and have damaged Minnesota.
Those remarks will inflame her allies. They also put on the record a president’s view that citizenship fraud, if proven, is not a paperwork technicality and that elected office does not place anyone above immigration law.
Separate reporting has examined other immigration-fraud angles around Omar, including a DNA case focused on an alleged marriage for immigration benefits and earlier steps in which agents sought DNA from trash before the D.C. home raid. Tuesday’s Oval Office comments stayed fixed on the age-and-citizenship track and the possibility of jail.
Omar is a sitting member of Congress. She is also a naturalized American whose entry and status are now the subject of a federal investigation serious enough to produce a home search and a phone seizure. Trump said she could face jail, not only removal, and called her a disgrace. Homan said the evidence will decide whether denaturalization follows.
Democrats call it a vendetta. The proper test is simpler: Did she tell the truth on the papers that made her a citizen, and will the same rules applied to ordinary applicants apply to a powerful critic of the president?
If the proof is there, office and outrage will not revise the statute. Lawful status is not a partisan favor, and voters deserve officials who cleared the same gate as everyone else.