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THE DRAGNET

DHS calls case against Omar 'strong': a childhood form, a sister's phone, trash pulled before any warrant.

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 17 October 2026

I called the Department of Motor Vehicles this morning because the sticker on my plate expired, and forty minutes later I still didn't have one, I had two disconnected numbers and a very patient woman named Carol who informed me I'd reached Records three times running when what I wanted was Permits. I wrote her name down. Force of habit. I write names down even when nobody's going to ask me for them later.

And while I was on hold waiting for Carol to transfer me a fourth time, something else came back to me that I'd been meaning to ask somebody about all week, and since I've got you now, I'll ask you instead of her.

On the 12th, CBS reported that federal agents had searched Representative Omar's home here in Washington, and that what they were looking for traced back to immigration paperwork — filled out by her father, when she was a child. I wrote the date down. A childhood form. That's the bottom of the file, as I understand it.

Two days later, on the 14th, the Guardian reported her phone had been seized and more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas had gone out, some of them to relatives. How many of that dozen went to relatives, I couldn't tell you from here. I'm asking, not guessing.

On the 16th, Secretary Mullin called the whole thing a "strong case" — strong enough, he said, to take to a grand jury. I wrote that word down too. Strong. Right under the date.

Then the next morning — today, the same morning as my sticker, as it happens — two more things landed. The Times reported that a phone belonging to Omar's sister had already been gone through, text messages and all, before agents ever searched the house. And the Hill reported that agents had been through her trash looking for DNA — "dumpster diving," they called it, which I guess really is the term, because I checked — before any search warrant existed to search anything.

Here's where I get stuck, and maybe you can set me straight, because I don't do this for a living. At the toll plaza by my house, the gate doesn't lift until the scanner reads the transponder — charge first, then the arm goes up, in that order, because that's how the machine's built. The registration sticker I was chasing this morning goes in the glovebox after the car passes inspection, not before, because the sticker is supposed to mean something already happened. I don't design these systems. I just drive the car, which needs a new fan belt, which is a separate phone call I still haven't made.

So when somebody's trash gets gone through before the warrant that's supposed to authorize going through it, what drawer does that belong in. I don't have an answer. I'm asking the way I'd ask Carol.

Speaking of — she's finally got me transferred to the right office, and before the new person can even say hello, I hear myself ask her something I hadn't planned to ask: out where she works, does the form that lets you search a thing exist before the search, or does it come after? She says before. Obviously before, she says. That one's not hard for her.

It's not hard for me either. I just want to know which came first — the Secretary calling it strong, or the trash that got searched before anybody had the paper saying they could.

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Homeland Security calls the case Omar's own lawyers call unlawful 'strong.'

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 17 October 2026

I've got a receipt in my coat pocket, from the garage by the courthouse, four dollars, dated Tuesday, and I don't remember parking there at all. That's the thing about a receipt — it tells you exactly what happened whether you remember it or not. I was looking for my reading glasses and found this instead, and it got me thinking about paperwork, which is a bad habit of mine, thinking about paperwork.

Because somewhere there's a piece of paper from a long time ago — childhood paperwork, I believe, filled out by a man for his daughter — the kind every family fills out once and forgets the minute the stamp goes on it. His daughter grew up, ran for Congress, Minnesota, first Somali American to do it. And on the 12th of this month, federal agents went into her Washington home over that same old form. I wrote the date down. The 12th.

Now, you'd figure a raid like that starts and ends with the one piece of paper. It didn't. Two days later, the 14th, they'd taken her phone, and they'd sent out — I want to say more than a dozen — grand jury subpoenas, some of them to her own relatives. I don't have anybody in Congress. If I did, I don't know what I'd tell my brother-in-law when that showed up at his door.

And somewhere in there — hold on, I had this written down, here it is — somewhere in there, before any judge signed a warrant, agents went through her trash. Pulled DNA off what she'd thrown out. Before the warrant. I keep coming back to that part, not because I don't believe it — I believe it, it's right here on the page — I'm just not clear anymore on what order things are supposed to happen in. I always figured the warrant came first and the trash came after. Maybe that's just me and how I was raised.

Her own lawyers put it in writing this week — Friday, the Associated Press had the letter — that the whole search was, in their words, "neither justified nor lawful." That's not the other side talking. That's her own people, asking the Justice Department, politely, to give back what they took.

And the government's word for all of it — I saw this in black and white, Homeland Security's own word for the case they built out of her garbage before the warrant ever showed up — was "strong." Strong. I wrote that one down too, underlined it twice, because I wanted to be sure I had it right. Strong.

I was going to leave it there. I really was.

Except — and I apologize, I know you've got somewhere to be — the House Majority Whip, a man named Emmer, said this week that if it all holds up, she ought to go to jail. Deported too. Over the form. The one her father filled out when she was a child, built on the trash they pulled before the warrant, that her own lawyers call unlawful.

That the government, in writing, calls strong.

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