Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who called the investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar a \"strong case\" and floated racketeering charges. Official DHS portrait by Tia Dufour (public domain).
In remarks on Friday and Saturday, two of the administration’s top immigration officials publicly vouched for the criminal investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar, with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggesting it could be treated as a racketeering case and border czar Tom Homan saying it could end in denaturalization. Neither statement changes the legal arithmetic that governs paperwork filed in 2000: a RICO theory still needs recent conduct to stand on, and denaturalization is built for a kind of citizenship Omar reportedly never received.
Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, has not been charged. She denies wrongdoing and has called the inquiry an effort “to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” The investigation reportedly turns on whether she was 17 or 18 when her father naturalized in 2000, a question examined in detail here last week.
What the two officials said
Speaking Friday on a podcast hosted by Andrew Kolvet of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” Mullin said agents served “multiple other warrants” on Oct. 12, the day they searched Omar’s Washington home, and that “we expect to be able to take the case to a grand jury,” CBS News reported. He called it “a strong case” and said coordinated immigration fraud “can be considered a RICO case,” suggesting that statutes of limitations would not stand in the way. CBS noted that he spoke hypothetically and did not say prosecutors are pursuing such charges.
Homan went further on denaturalization in an interview aired Saturday on Fox News’ “The Big Weekend Show.” He said he had “been told they have a strong case,” that “if you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody,” and that “if the evidence points that way, that could happen,” according to Fox News. Omar, he said, should be “held to the same standards you and I are held.”
Why racketeering law does not reset the clock
Immigration fraud can indeed feed a RICO case: the statute’s predicate crimes include unlawfully procuring citizenship (18 U.S.C. 1425) and lying on a passport application (18 U.S.C. 1542). But a criminal RICO charge must still be brought within the general five-year federal limitations period, and older acts count only when tied to conduct, or a continuing conspiracy, that reaches into that window. The Supreme Court held in Grunewald v. United States (1957) that concealing a finished conspiracy does not keep it alive.
So RICO would not solve the problem prosecutors already face. Naturalization and passport crimes carry a 10-year limit under 18 U.S.C. 3291, which leaves the 2000 naturalization out of reach on its own. What remains chargeable is recent conduct, chiefly passport applications that restate a birth date under penalty of perjury, which CNN has reported investigators are examining. A racketeering count would rest on that same conduct, plus the added burden of proving an enterprise and a pattern.
A RICO charge is an accusation brought under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (or similar state laws) that targets individuals involved in an ongoing, organized criminal enterprise. Instead of prosecuting crimes as isolated, individual incidents, a RICO charge lets prosecutors tie multiple people and diverse offenses together into a single criminal conspiracy case.
Denaturalization has no deadline, but may not fit
Homan’s route has a different obstacle. Civil denaturalization under 8 U.S.C. 1451(a) has no statute of limitations, and the government is using it far more than before. According to data compiled by TRAC at Syracuse University, prosecutors filed 125 civil denaturalization suits from 2008 through 2025, or about seven a year based on TRAC’s figures, then 105 in the first seven months of 2026. A suit revokes the order admitting a person to citizenship; removal requires a separate proceeding.
But Omar, by her own account, became a citizen automatically through her father as a minor, so no order was ever entered in her name. If the theory is that she was already 18, the claim is not that she lied her way into citizenship but that she never acquired it, a citizenship dispute that needs no proof of fraud. Revoking her late father’s naturalization to reach her would be legally novel. Everything turns on whether investigators can prove her true birth year; nothing public so far shows that they can.
What comes next
- Sealed records: more than a dozen news organizations and Judicial Watch have asked a federal judge to unseal search records, and the judge is set to hear from the Justice Department this week, CNN reported.
- Grand jury: more than a dozen subpoenas have been issued for testimony before a Minnesota grand jury, including to some of Omar’s relatives, according to The Wall Street Journal. Any indictment would show for the first time which statutes and which years prosecutors are relying on.
Election Day is Nov. 3. A contested denaturalization case typically takes one to three years in district court, an immigration attorney told CNN, so no court is likely to settle Omar’s status before voters weigh in.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
Sources
- CBS News: DHS Secretary Mullin calls Ilhan Omar probe a “strong case,” says agents executed multiple search warrants (Oct. 16, 2026)
- Fox News: Homan says Ilhan Omar could be stripped of naturalization if immigration fraud is proven (Oct. 18, 2026)
- CNN: It wouldn’t be easy to strip Rep. Ilhan Omar of her citizenship, legal experts say (Oct. 17, 2026)
- The National News Desk: Investigation into Ilhan Omar intensifies after home searched, subpoenas issued (citing The Wall Street Journal; Oct. 15-16, 2026)
- TRAC, Syracuse University: As Denaturalization Lawsuits Surge, Their Basis Lacks Transparency (Aug. 21, 2026; data for 2008 through July 2026)
- 18 U.S.C. 1961 (RICO definitions, predicate acts and pattern); 18 U.S.C. 3282 and 3291 (limitations periods); 8 U.S.C. 1451 (revocation of naturalization)
- Grunewald v. United States, 353 U.S. 391 (1957)
- Immigration Analytics: Omar’s lawyers say agents broke a judge’s search conditions (Oct. 17, 2026)
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