The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington said on Tuesday that it would not unseal a search warrant executed by federal agents at the home of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota this month.
The office also asked a federal judge to deny requests for the warrant’s release.
The requests to immediately unseal the search warrant and other related records were made by 15 news organizations, including The New York Times, and Judicial Watch, a conservative activist group, in the days after the search of Ms. Omar’s home in Washington on Oct. 12.
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney, said in a court filing on Tuesday that the organizations’ requests were premature, partly because the Justice Department’s investigation is ongoing. The 47-page document was significantly redacted.
Ms. Pirro said in the document that the requests had been made “before a charging decision has been reached and publicly announced.”
She said the government was not opposed to unsealing some of the materials later, but that doing so now “imperils the investigation.”
Federal agents searched Ms. Omar’s home after the Department of Homeland Security said it was investigating Ms. Omar, a Democrat, over her family’s immigration paperwork. The Times reported that the search warrant lists a series of potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, as well as a general conspiracy charge, according to a person familiar with the document.
Ms. Omar has said that the allegations that she and her family committed immigration fraud were false and politically motivated. In a statement after the search, she said the raid was “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”
Lawyers for Ms. Omar did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday.
Ms. Omar, who has said that she was born in 1982 in Mogadishu, Somalia, wrote in a memoir that she had fled a civil war in the country with her family when she was around 8. They were admitted as refugees in the United States in 1995 and eventually settled in Minnesota, which is home to a large Somali community. She has said that she acquired U.S. citizenship through her father’s naturalization case in 2000, when she was 17.
President Trump has long expressed disdain for Ms. Omar, an outspoken critic of his administration. On Tuesday, he told reporters that Ms. Omar could face deportation and called her a “sick and very dishonest person.”
The search warrant for her home was executed 22 days before the midterm elections, in which Ms. Omar is running for a fifth term in the House of Representatives. Justice Department policy urges prosecutors to exercise caution in politically sensitive cases 60 days before an election.
In an application for the sealed records, lawyers for the The Times said that the lack of transparency regarding the search warrant was “particularly intolerable” in the run-up to an election.
A separate application was filed by 14 news organizations, including The Associated Press, Bloomberg, CNN and The Wall Street Journal.
“Given the enormous public interest in and historic significance of a search warrant executed at the home of a sitting member of Congress, any potential interest in their continued secrecy is clearly outweighed,” lawyers for the 14 organizations said in their joint filing.
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