WEBVTT
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The most important question here isn't about the raid.
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It isn't even about Ilhan Omar.
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It's a question about what citizenship actually guarantees.
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Can the government take away a person's citizenship?
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And if it can, what does it have to prove?
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Last Monday, federal agents walked up to a house in Washington, D.C.
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and started a search.
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The house belongs to a sitting member of Congress.
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Within hours, the country had split into two completely different versions of the same event.
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One version said, a judge signed a warrant, an investigation is underway, and no one is above the law.
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The other version said, three weeks before an election, this is the federal government going after a political enemy.
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Both versions are about the raid.
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But I want to talk about the question underneath it, because the Wall Street Journal, citing U.S.
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officials and other people familiar with the probe, reports that this investigation is aimed at building a case to revoke her citizenship.
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That process has a name, denaturalization.
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And if it sounds like something out of a history book, it isn't.
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It's a real power written into federal law.
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And last year, the Justice Department's civil division told its lawyers to pursue it aggressively wherever the law allows.
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So today on Behind the Story, I'm going to walk through what is actually known, what is only alleged, and how denaturalization really works in plain English.
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And then the strongest case for each side.
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Let's start with what's confirmed.
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Because in a story this charged, the confirmed list is actually shorter than you'd think.
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On Monday, October 12th, agents from Homeland Security searched Representative Omar's home in the Washington area.
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The Justice Department said the agents executed a judicially authorized search warrant as part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.
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That's essentially the department's entire public statement.
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It hasn't described what the warrant covered or what investigators were looking for.
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And here's a detail I find genuinely important.
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According to CNN, the warrant was approved by a federal magistrate judge who limited how prosecutors could get into her records.
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Because she's a member of Congress, he required a screening process to protect her legislative work, which ties to a constitutional protection called the Speech or Debate Clause.
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CNN sources say the Justice Department argued there was little need for that screening.
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So the judge signed a warrant and set guardrails.
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Now, what is the investigation about?
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The investigators are examining whether Omar or her late father lied about the age when she became a citizen in the year 2000.
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The Washington Post reports the focus is on her birth date and citizenship papers.
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Omar came to the United States from Somalia as a child refugee in the 90s.
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She's told the New York Times she was 17 when she was naturalized.
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The Wall Street Journal reports the core question is whether she or her late father changed her age on the paperwork so she would appear 17 rather than 18.
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Her father died in 2020, which makes it very complicated to gather evidence.
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There's also an older allegation, one that's followed her before her first campaign, and that is that her ex-husband is actually her brother.
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She's denied it for years, and it is unsubstantiated, and even if it were true, the statute of limitations is likely run out.
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So the age question, not the marriage question, appears to be the center of the gravity here.
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CNN reports at least a dozen subpoenas, mostly to relatives, and says prosecutors could expand this into a conspiracy investigation covering a larger group over many years.
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The Associated Press, citing a person briefed on the probe, reports her phone was seized and that the subpoenas come from a grand jury in Minnesota.
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So where did all of this come from?
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It didn't start last Monday.
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CNN says the case was reopened last year after Biden era investigators brought no charges, and it's been run by prosecutors in the Deputy Attorney General's office and the U.S.
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Attorney's Office in Minneapolis.
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Vice President Vance said publicly in March that he believes she committed immigration fraud.
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Then he said in May he didn't want to prejudge the investigation.
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In September, Bordazar Tom Holman confirmed a criminal investigation was on the way.
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And what does Congresswoman Omar say?
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She says she's done nothing wrong.
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She calls this, in her words, an attempt to weaponize federal law enforcement against political enemies and says she will not be silenced.
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So here's what's confirmed.
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There's a judge-approved search, an active criminal investigation, and subpoenas.
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What's alleged, mostly through anonymous sources, is a possible age misstatement in her citizenship papers.
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What's not happening is any charge, any civil case, any public evidence.
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Nothing has been filed in a courtroom.
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How does the government actually take someone's citizenship?
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Most people assume it's either easy or impossible.
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It's neither.
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It starts at the Justice Department where a lawyer decides whether to file a case.
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And there are two roads: a civil case under a federal statute, section 1451, or a criminal case for unlawfully obtaining citizenship.
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Either way, and this is important, the decision maker isn't an immigration judge inside the executive branch.
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It's an independent federal judge.
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The grounds are narrow.
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Either the person wasn't actually eligible when they were naturalized, which the law calls citizenship that was illegally procured, or they got it by concealing or misrepresenting a material fact.
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You should notice what's not on the list, and that is bad behavior after you become a citizen.
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The test looks backward to the moment you were naturalized, and the burden is heavy.
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In a 1981 case called Federenko vs the United States, the Supreme Court said the government must prove its case with evidence that is clear, unequivocal, and convincing, and it called the right to American citizenship a precious one.
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That's higher than the usual civil standard.
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In a criminal case, it's the highest standard we have, which is beyond a reasonable doubt, with a 10-year statute of limitations.
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In a civil case, there is no statute of limitations at all.
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Here's where it gets technical.
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And it matters a lot in this story.
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In 2017, in Maslin Jack versus the United States, all nine justices agreed on the outcome.
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The court said a lie in the naturalization process only counts if it played some role in getting the citizenship.
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A false statement that wouldn't have changed the outcome isn't enough.
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The government has to connect the lie to the result.
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And even then, the person can still win by proving she was actually qualified.
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There's one more layer, and it's a constitutional backdrop.
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In 1967, in Afroyim vs.
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Rusk, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that citizenship can't be involuntarily taken away just because Congress says so.
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Temple Law Professor Peter Spearer told the Senate subcommittee in June that, as a result, involuntary loss of citizenship is nearly impossible outside the narrow category of citizenship that was unlawfully obtained to begin with, which is exactly the category the government would have to prove here.
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The Migration Policy Institute found about 11 denaturalization cases filed per year on average between 1990 and 2017.
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In June 2025, the Assistant Attorney General signed a civil division memo directing lawyers to maximally pursue denaturalization wherever the law allows, and the evidence supports it across 10 categories from terrorism to fraud on government programs.
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The Justice Department has announced efforts against at least 108 people this year.
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That's a big jump from 11.
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It's also still tiny next to the hundreds of thousands of people naturalized every year.
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Now, one wrinkle specific to this case is how a minor becomes a citizen.
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And at the time, federal law let children under 18 be naturalized if both parents were citizens.
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And the 2001 law changed that to just one parent.
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So why does that matter?
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Because Omar's age isn't just a detail.
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If she was a minor when her father naturalized, her path to citizenship could look different than if she was an adult who needed her own application.
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Jonathan Turley argues that the facts on her age and her father's status are decisive, and that he finds it highly likely the conditions weren't met.
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Others dispute how strong any case would be.
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And one thing denaturalization doesn't mean is automatic deportation.
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A former immigration judge told Time magazine that someone who held a green card before naturalizing can keep that status until ICE gets a final removal order.
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So now you have the facts and the law.
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Let's start with the strongest case for each side, with equal care.
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I'll start with the case for the investigation.
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First, the principle.
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Congress wrote the denaturalization statute and in Federenko, Supreme Court said judges had no equitable discretion to excuse citizenship that was illegally procured.
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Supporters say that means the law can't have a carve out for powerful people.
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Tom Holman put it this way: No one's above the law, and if a government would pursue a lesser-known naturalized citizen over false paperwork, it should do the same for a member of Congress.
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Second, process.
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Supporters point out that a judge, not a political appointee, signed the warrant, and that the magistrate even added protections for her legislative work, which they say is the system working the way it's supposed to.
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They also note that this case isn't new.
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It was reopened last year after an earlier probe, and third, the facts they say deserve examination.
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Firley argues the immigration law is clear, and that her stated age and her father's status raises real questions.
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Time magazine reports that shortly after her election, her staff reportedly sought to change her listed birth year from 1981 to 1982, which supporters would call exactly the kind of discrepancy an investigator is obligated to look into.
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Their bottom line is investigating isn't convicting.
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A warrant is how you find out.
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And fourth, the integrity of the system itself.
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Supporters argue that naturalization runs on honesty, that the vast majority of naturalized citizens follow the rules, and that enforcing the law against fraud protects those citizens and the meaning of citizenship itself.
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They also say the timing objection proves too much.
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If any inquiry into a politician becomes suspect within weeks of an election, then simply being on the ballot becomes a shield.
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Now here's what the critics say, and I want to give them the same space.
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First, the bar.
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Immigration attorney Michael Wilde, speaking on Fox, called it a very high bar and said he hadn't seen anything he considered worthy of prosecution.
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On the Maslinjact, the government has to tie any misstatement to the result.
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And the experts Times spoke to said it's unclear what evidence, if any, shows the application was fraudulent or that anyone intentionally misrepresented anything.
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If her father filled out the paperwork when she was 17, they ask, what exactly is she supposed to have lied about?
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Second, the record of public statements.
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Critics point out that in March, the vice president said she definitely committed immigration fraud before saying in May that he didn't want to prejudge.
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They say that a conclusion announced before the evidence is the opposite of how an investigation is supposed to work.
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Third, timing and pattern.
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The election is November 3rd.
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Monday's search came 22 days out.
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CNN reports that top justice officials approved it despite the department's general practice of avoiding overt investigative steps within 60 days of an election.
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Supporters say that the 60-day practice is a norm, not a law, and that the case should stand or fall on its own facts.
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And fourth, and this is the biggest concern, Professor Spear told senators that aggressive denaturalization tells roughly 25 million naturalized Americans their citizenship is second class, even if very few are ever actually stripped.
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That's a harm critics say exists before any court rules.
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So where does that leave us?
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If the government files a case showing documents, a clear lie, and a link between that lie and her citizenship, concerns about timing won't erase that evidence.
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And supporters say the process would have worked.
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If weeks pass and nothing is filed, or a court rejects the theory, critics will say the timing and the rhetoric told you everything.
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Both are legitimate ways to see it.
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And what you're watching for is simple: a charge, a civil petition in federal court, how the judge's screening process plays out, and whatever happens on November 3rd.
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Here's what I keep coming back to.
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Whatever you think of Congresswoman Omar, and people have strong feelings in both directions, the standard that applies to her is the standard that applies to the next naturalized citizen and the next and the one after that.
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Clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence.
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A real connection between a lie and the result.
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If you'd want those protections for someone you like, you should want them for someone you don't.
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And if you believe the law should be enforced no matter who it touches, you should want it enforced the same way for everyone, including the powerful.
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So let me throw it to you.
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Is the real question here the evidence or the timing?
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Should members of Congress be treated differently when they're investigated, or exactly the same as the rest of us?
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And where, if anywhere, should the government's power to revoke citizenship stop?
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I'm really curious where you fall on this one.
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So go ahead and leave me a comment.
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Be honest, be human, and as always, go behind the story.
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I'm Gelani Gonzalez.
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The most important question here isn't about the raid.
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It isn't even about Ilhan Omar.
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It's a question about what citizenship actually guarantees.
00:00:11.119 --> 00:00:13.839
Can the government take away a person's citizenship?
00:00:14.080 --> 00:00:17.440
And if it can, what does it have to prove?
00:00:17.679 --> 00:00:21.760
Last Monday, federal agents walked up to a house in Washington, D.C.
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and started a search.
00:00:23.280 --> 00:00:26.160
The house belongs to a sitting member of Congress.
00:00:26.399 --> 00:00:31.920
Within hours, the country had split into two completely different versions of the same event.
00:00:32.159 --> 00:00:39.759
One version said, a judge signed a warrant, an investigation is underway, and no one is above the law.
00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:47.600
The other version said, three weeks before an election, this is the federal government going after a political enemy.
00:00:47.840 --> 00:00:49.920
Both versions are about the raid.
00:00:50.079 --> 00:00:55.039
But I want to talk about the question underneath it, because the Wall Street Journal, citing U.S.
00:00:55.119 --> 00:01:04.640
officials and other people familiar with the probe, reports that this investigation is aimed at building a case to revoke her citizenship.
00:01:04.879 --> 00:01:08.079
That process has a name, denaturalization.
00:01:08.239 --> 00:01:11.439
And if it sounds like something out of a history book, it isn't.
00:01:11.680 --> 00:01:14.719
It's a real power written into federal law.
00:01:14.879 --> 00:01:22.640
And last year, the Justice Department's civil division told its lawyers to pursue it aggressively wherever the law allows.
00:01:22.879 --> 00:01:34.000
So today on Behind the Story, I'm going to walk through what is actually known, what is only alleged, and how denaturalization really works in plain English.
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And then the strongest case for each side.
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Let's start with what's confirmed.
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Because in a story this charged, the confirmed list is actually shorter than you'd think.
00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:54.400
On Monday, October 12th, agents from Homeland Security searched Representative Omar's home in the Washington area.
00:01:54.560 --> 00:02:03.599
The Justice Department said the agents executed a judicially authorized search warrant as part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.
00:02:03.840 --> 00:02:07.519
That's essentially the department's entire public statement.
00:02:07.760 --> 00:02:12.960
It hasn't described what the warrant covered or what investigators were looking for.
00:02:13.199 --> 00:02:16.479
And here's a detail I find genuinely important.
00:02:17.120 --> 00:02:26.080
According to CNN, the warrant was approved by a federal magistrate judge who limited how prosecutors could get into her records.
00:02:26.319 --> 00:02:37.599
Because she's a member of Congress, he required a screening process to protect her legislative work, which ties to a constitutional protection called the Speech or Debate Clause.
00:02:37.759 --> 00:02:42.800
CNN sources say the Justice Department argued there was little need for that screening.
00:02:42.960 --> 00:02:46.319
So the judge signed a warrant and set guardrails.
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Now, what is the investigation about?
00:02:49.680 --> 00:02:59.280
The investigators are examining whether Omar or her late father lied about the age when she became a citizen in the year 2000.
00:02:59.439 --> 00:03:05.439
The Washington Post reports the focus is on her birth date and citizenship papers.
00:03:05.759 --> 00:03:10.719
Omar came to the United States from Somalia as a child refugee in the 90s.
00:03:10.879 --> 00:03:14.960
She's told the New York Times she was 17 when she was naturalized.
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The Wall Street Journal reports the core question is whether she or her late father changed her age on the paperwork so she would appear 17 rather than 18.
00:03:27.759 --> 00:03:33.680
Her father died in 2020, which makes it very complicated to gather evidence.
00:03:34.080 --> 00:03:43.520
There's also an older allegation, one that's followed her before her first campaign, and that is that her ex-husband is actually her brother.
00:03:43.919 --> 00:03:53.840
She's denied it for years, and it is unsubstantiated, and even if it were true, the statute of limitations is likely run out.
00:03:54.080 --> 00:03:58.800
So the age question, not the marriage question, appears to be the center of the gravity here.
00:03:59.120 --> 00:04:11.360
CNN reports at least a dozen subpoenas, mostly to relatives, and says prosecutors could expand this into a conspiracy investigation covering a larger group over many years.
00:04:11.680 --> 00:04:20.000
The Associated Press, citing a person briefed on the probe, reports her phone was seized and that the subpoenas come from a grand jury in Minnesota.
00:04:20.240 --> 00:04:22.319
So where did all of this come from?
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It didn't start last Monday.
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CNN says the case was reopened last year after Biden era investigators brought no charges, and it's been run by prosecutors in the Deputy Attorney General's office and the U.S.
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Attorney's Office in Minneapolis.
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Vice President Vance said publicly in March that he believes she committed immigration fraud.
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Then he said in May he didn't want to prejudge the investigation.
00:04:48.319 --> 00:04:54.240
In September, Bordazar Tom Holman confirmed a criminal investigation was on the way.
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And what does Congresswoman Omar say?
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She says she's done nothing wrong.
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She calls this, in her words, an attempt to weaponize federal law enforcement against political enemies and says she will not be silenced.
00:05:11.839 --> 00:05:13.600
So here's what's confirmed.
00:05:13.839 --> 00:05:19.600
There's a judge-approved search, an active criminal investigation, and subpoenas.
00:05:20.079 --> 00:05:27.519
What's alleged, mostly through anonymous sources, is a possible age misstatement in her citizenship papers.
00:05:27.759 --> 00:05:34.480
What's not happening is any charge, any civil case, any public evidence.
00:05:34.800 --> 00:05:37.519
Nothing has been filed in a courtroom.
00:05:41.519 --> 00:05:44.720
How does the government actually take someone's citizenship?
00:05:44.879 --> 00:05:48.879
Most people assume it's either easy or impossible.
00:05:49.120 --> 00:05:50.079
It's neither.
00:05:50.319 --> 00:05:54.800
It starts at the Justice Department where a lawyer decides whether to file a case.
00:05:54.959 --> 00:06:05.600
And there are two roads: a civil case under a federal statute, section 1451, or a criminal case for unlawfully obtaining citizenship.
00:06:05.839 --> 00:06:13.600
Either way, and this is important, the decision maker isn't an immigration judge inside the executive branch.
00:06:13.839 --> 00:06:16.399
It's an independent federal judge.
00:06:16.639 --> 00:06:18.079
The grounds are narrow.
00:06:18.319 --> 00:06:32.000
Either the person wasn't actually eligible when they were naturalized, which the law calls citizenship that was illegally procured, or they got it by concealing or misrepresenting a material fact.
00:06:32.240 --> 00:06:39.519
You should notice what's not on the list, and that is bad behavior after you become a citizen.
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The test looks backward to the moment you were naturalized, and the burden is heavy.
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In a 1981 case called Federenko vs the United States, the Supreme Court said the government must prove its case with evidence that is clear, unequivocal, and convincing, and it called the right to American citizenship a precious one.
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That's higher than the usual civil standard.
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In a criminal case, it's the highest standard we have, which is beyond a reasonable doubt, with a 10-year statute of limitations.
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In a civil case, there is no statute of limitations at all.
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Here's where it gets technical.
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And it matters a lot in this story.
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In 2017, in Maslin Jack versus the United States, all nine justices agreed on the outcome.
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The court said a lie in the naturalization process only counts if it played some role in getting the citizenship.
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A false statement that wouldn't have changed the outcome isn't enough.
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The government has to connect the lie to the result.
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And even then, the person can still win by proving she was actually qualified.
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There's one more layer, and it's a constitutional backdrop.
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In 1967, in Afroyim vs.
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Rusk, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that citizenship can't be involuntarily taken away just because Congress says so.
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Temple Law Professor Peter Spearer told the Senate subcommittee in June that, as a result, involuntary loss of citizenship is nearly impossible outside the narrow category of citizenship that was unlawfully obtained to begin with, which is exactly the category the government would have to prove here.
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The Migration Policy Institute found about 11 denaturalization cases filed per year on average between 1990 and 2017.
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In June 2025, the Assistant Attorney General signed a civil division memo directing lawyers to maximally pursue denaturalization wherever the law allows, and the evidence supports it across 10 categories from terrorism to fraud on government programs.
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The Justice Department has announced efforts against at least 108 people this year.
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That's a big jump from 11.
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It's also still tiny next to the hundreds of thousands of people naturalized every year.
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Now, one wrinkle specific to this case is how a minor becomes a citizen.
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And at the time, federal law let children under 18 be naturalized if both parents were citizens.
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And the 2001 law changed that to just one parent.
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So why does that matter?
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Because Omar's age isn't just a detail.
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If she was a minor when her father naturalized, her path to citizenship could look different than if she was an adult who needed her own application.
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Jonathan Turley argues that the facts on her age and her father's status are decisive, and that he finds it highly likely the conditions weren't met.
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Others dispute how strong any case would be.
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And one thing denaturalization doesn't mean is automatic deportation.
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A former immigration judge told Time magazine that someone who held a green card before naturalizing can keep that status until ICE gets a final removal order.
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So now you have the facts and the law.
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Let's start with the strongest case for each side, with equal care.
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I'll start with the case for the investigation.
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First, the principle.
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Congress wrote the denaturalization statute and in Federenko, Supreme Court said judges had no equitable discretion to excuse citizenship that was illegally procured.
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Supporters say that means the law can't have a carve out for powerful people.
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Tom Holman put it this way: No one's above the law, and if a government would pursue a lesser-known naturalized citizen over false paperwork, it should do the same for a member of Congress.
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Second, process.
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Supporters point out that a judge, not a political appointee, signed the warrant, and that the magistrate even added protections for her legislative work, which they say is the system working the way it's supposed to.
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They also note that this case isn't new.
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It was reopened last year after an earlier probe, and third, the facts they say deserve examination.
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Firley argues the immigration law is clear, and that her stated age and her father's status raises real questions.
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Time magazine reports that shortly after her election, her staff reportedly sought to change her listed birth year from 1981 to 1982, which supporters would call exactly the kind of discrepancy an investigator is obligated to look into.
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Their bottom line is investigating isn't convicting.
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A warrant is how you find out.
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And fourth, the integrity of the system itself.
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Supporters argue that naturalization runs on honesty, that the vast majority of naturalized citizens follow the rules, and that enforcing the law against fraud protects those citizens and the meaning of citizenship itself.
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They also say the timing objection proves too much.
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If any inquiry into a politician becomes suspect within weeks of an election, then simply being on the ballot becomes a shield.
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Now here's what the critics say, and I want to give them the same space.
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First, the bar.
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Immigration attorney Michael Wilde, speaking on Fox, called it a very high bar and said he hadn't seen anything he considered worthy of prosecution.
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On the Maslinjact, the government has to tie any misstatement to the result.
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And the experts Times spoke to said it's unclear what evidence, if any, shows the application was fraudulent or that anyone intentionally misrepresented anything.
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If her father filled out the paperwork when she was 17, they ask, what exactly is she supposed to have lied about?
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Second, the record of public statements.
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Critics point out that in March, the vice president said she definitely committed immigration fraud before saying in May that he didn't want to prejudge.
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They say that a conclusion announced before the evidence is the opposite of how an investigation is supposed to work.
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Third, timing and pattern.
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The election is November 3rd.
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Monday's search came 22 days out.
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CNN reports that top justice officials approved it despite the department's general practice of avoiding overt investigative steps within 60 days of an election.
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Supporters say that the 60-day practice is a norm, not a law, and that the case should stand or fall on its own facts.
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And fourth, and this is the biggest concern, Professor Spear told senators that aggressive denaturalization tells roughly 25 million naturalized Americans their citizenship is second class, even if very few are ever actually stripped.
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That's a harm critics say exists before any court rules.
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So where does that leave us?
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If the government files a case showing documents, a clear lie, and a link between that lie and her citizenship, concerns about timing won't erase that evidence.
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And supporters say the process would have worked.
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If weeks pass and nothing is filed, or a court rejects the theory, critics will say the timing and the rhetoric told you everything.
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Both are legitimate ways to see it.
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And what you're watching for is simple: a charge, a civil petition in federal court, how the judge's screening process plays out, and whatever happens on November 3rd.
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Here's what I keep coming back to.
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Whatever you think of Congresswoman Omar, and people have strong feelings in both directions, the standard that applies to her is the standard that applies to the next naturalized citizen and the next and the one after that.
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Clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence.
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A real connection between a lie and the result.
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If you'd want those protections for someone you like, you should want them for someone you don't.
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And if you believe the law should be enforced no matter who it touches, you should want it enforced the same way for everyone, including the powerful.
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So let me throw it to you.
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Is the real question here the evidence or the timing?
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Should members of Congress be treated differently when they're investigated, or exactly the same as the rest of us?
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And where, if anywhere, should the government's power to revoke citizenship stop?
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I'm really curious where you fall on this one.
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So go ahead and leave me a comment.
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Be honest, be human, and as always, go behind the story.
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I'm Gelani Gonzalez.
