Ilhan Omar wins a fifth term with her biggest share since 2018, weeks after federal agents searched her home
The Mogadishu-born congresswoman took 76.5% in Minneapolis. She has not been charged, and denies any wrongdoing.
Minneapolis — Ilhan Omar, the first Somali American in the US Congress, has been re-elected in Minnesota's 5th District with her largest share of the vote since she first won the seat in 2018.
With 99% of votes counted she had 263,166 votes, or 76.5%. The Republican John Nagel had 16.2% and the independent DeVelle Jackson 7%. She took 74.4% in 2024 and 64.3% in 2020.
"We will not allow Trump to silence us," she said on X after the result.
From Dadaab to Minneapolis
Omar was born in Mogadishu in 1982. Her family fled the civil war and spent four years in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, before reaching New York in 1995 and settling in Minneapolis. She became a US citizen in 2000.
She won a seat in the Minnesota House in 2016, and two years later became the first Somali American elected to Congress and one of its first Muslim women.
An open investigation
On 12 October, Homeland Security Investigations agents searched her Washington home under a court-authorised warrant. The Justice Department said this was part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation, reported to concern her immigration paperwork.
Omar has not been charged. She denies wrongdoing and called the search an attempt to target political opponents, and her attorney has described the investigation as politically motivated. No evidence of wrongdoing has been made public. President Trump, a frequent critic, said authorities were looking at her "very carefully".
Her new term begins in January.
Source: Newsweek, Fox 9, CBS Minnesota, BBC via Yahoo News, Wikipedia, November 2026.
