Category: reason

DHS Searched Ilhan Omar’s Home as Part of Immigration Fraud Investigation


Ilhan Omar | Illustration: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom.

On Monday, CBS News reported that federal agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.), as part of an ongoing investigation that “centers on Omar’s immigration paperwork.” 

In a statement to the Associated Press, the Justice Department said agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)—an office within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that conducts federal criminal investigations into immigration fraud and identity and benefits fraud—”executed a judicially authorized search warrant” as “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” 

The search warrant reportedly “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 The New York Times. The Times reported that federal officials are also investigating “whether Ms. Omar derived citizenship from a father who may have been ineligible to obtain naturalized status.” In a statement, Omar called the investigation an “outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies,” stating she did “nothing wrong.”

Omar has been in the Justice Department’s crosshairs since January, when President Donald Trump announced that the department and Congress were “looking at ‘Congresswoman’ Illhan Omar, who left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars.” 

Trump was referencing an investigation by the House Ethics Committee, based on a 2025 financial disclosure form showing she and her husband held assets worth between $6 million and $30 million, a notable increase from her previous filings. Omar later filed an amended disclosure form that showed the assets were worth $18,004 to $95,000 after accounting for liabilities. However, in September, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Office of Congressional Conduct—which reviews allegations against House members and their staff—voted 5–1 to recommend that the House Ethics Committee dismiss the allegations. Per the Journal, investigators found no “substantial reason to believe that Rep. Omar reported false or incomplete information in her financial disclosures.” Omar’s office told the Journal she didn’t catch the errors, which stemmed from erroneous valuations of her husband’s businesses, because she “isn’t involved in her husband’s businesses and trusted the accountant involved.”

The investigation into Omar appears to be part and parcel of the Trump administration’s weaponization of government—which the president vowed to end—adding to a list of cases that includes former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, former FBI Director James Comey, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

Omar’s opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts, particularly in her home state of Minnesota, and her Somali heritage have made her a frequent target of the president and his allies. 

Last December, a federal indictment revealed a nearly $9 billion fraud scandal in Minnesota, much of it tied to the state’s Somali immigrants. In March, Vice President J.D. Vance—who leads the Trump administration’s anti-fraud task force—told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson that Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America.” Vance accused Omar of “being at the center of a lot of the worst fraudsters in the Somali community.” 

Vance doubled down in May, telling White House reporters the immigration fraud allegations were “something that the Department of Justice is looking at right now.” He appeared to pull back from his March claim that he was certain Omar had committed immigration fraud, instead stating that while he didn’t want to “prejudge an investigation,” it “certainly seems like something fishy is there.”

In September, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Johnson that the investigation into Omar was still “ongoing,” and that the department knew she had “married her brother to try to bring him into the United States.” Omar’s office has denied the accusations, which were first levied against her in 2016. 

Mullin claims the investigation into Omar is “not political.” He could be telling the truth; federal investigators have scrutinized Omar before. In 2024, the Biden administration’s Justice Department opened an investigation into Omar’s “finances, campaign spending and interactions with a foreign citizen,” according to The New York Times. Per the Times, the investigation eventually “stalled for lack of evidence.” 

But Mullin’s words are also hard to take at face value. Despite denying accusations of weaponizing the justice system, the Trump administration has time and again used dubious legal reasoning to investigate the president’s political enemies. This includes New York Attorney General Letitia James, who, after successfully suing Trump for financial fraud, was indicted for mortgage fraud by Trump’s Justice Department, which used the same petty justification on her. 

The president has also continued a campaign to indict Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, announcing last week that the White House would hold in-person hearings to look into claims she committed mortgage fraud. Ousting Cook would ostensibly allow the president to install a Fed governor aligned with his priorities. It’s a tactic that failed Trump once before, when his Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for his handling of renovations at the central bank’s headquarters. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, dropped the probe in April, and the department ultimately found nothing criminal in Powell’s conduct.

An investigation will reveal whether Omar broke the law. Still, if it’s anything like the Trump administration’s previous efforts, the investigation is likely driven by political animus, not criminal behavior.

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Are Warrantless Phone Searches at the Border Constitutional? The Supreme Court May Soon Decide.


Border phone search | Tatiana Chekryzhova/Dreamstime/rudenkoalla/Magnific/Mariam Zakaidze

George Anibowei, a U.S. citizen, is a Texas-based immigration attorney with many clients battling the Department of Homeland Security. Border agents have searched his phone at least five times without a warrant as he returned to the United States.

In the first search, agents copied the phone’s entire contents, including his confidential communications with clients. The government still has that data, and Anibowei still doesn’t know why it was kept or who has seen it. He now leaves his work phone at home when he travels.

On September 29, the Supreme Court asked the federal government to respond to Anibowei’s petition, which asks whether the Fourth Amendment lets border agents search the contents of a phone without a warrant. (I’m one of his lawyers.) The government waived its response, expecting the Court would deny the petition without a second look.

But in 2021, the solicitor general told the Court that this very question had produced an “entrenched circuit conflict” of “considerable practical importance.” The conflict has only deepened since. Seven federal appeals courts now hold that a warrant is never required to search a phone at the border, while the 4th and 9th Circuits require one in at least some cases. That means one of your constitutional rights currently depends on which airport you fly into.

While circuit courts may disagree, the Supreme Court has already shown the best answer for this question. In Riley v. California (2014), the Court unanimously held that police generally need a warrant to search the phone of someone they arrest. There is an exception for searches incident to arrest, which allows the police to arrest someone without a warrant; that exists to protect officers and preserve evidence. Data can’t hurt an officer, and a phone can be secured while police get a warrant. An extension of an old exception to digital data, the court said, “has to rest on its own bottom.” Treating a phone like any other container in an arrestee’s pockets was like saying “a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon.”

The border-search exception fails the same test. Those searches exist to collect duties, keep out people who may not enter, and stop contraband. But duties attach to physical goods, not data. And as the legal scholar Orin Kerr has put it, agents “will not find a person smuggled inside a computer hard drive.” As for digital contraband, anyone who wants illicit files can carry a clean phone and download them after clearing customs. Suspicionless phone searches burden millions of innocent travelers while barely inconveniencing smugglers.

The appeals courts that disagree mostly cite one another. But the Supreme Court rejected a lopsided lower-court consensus in Riley, and again in Carpenter v. United States (2018). Counting courts is not a constitutional argument.

Defenders of these searches lean on history. In United States v. Ramsey (1977), the Court noted that the first Congress authorized warrantless customs searches in 1789, less than two months before it proposed the Fourth Amendment. True enough. But that statute let officers search ships for hidden dutiable goods. To search a house, store, or other building for the same goods, officers needed a warrant. And nothing in the statute let officers read a traveler’s papers.

That distinction was no accident. Customs abuses had helped spark the Revolution. Writs of assistance gave British customs officers blanket authority to search wherever they pleased, which James Otis said placed “the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” And the founding generation guarded letters especially closely. Benjamin Franklin, as the first postmaster general, made postal workers swear they would not open mail without an express written warrant.

Even Ramsey, the government’s favorite border search precedent, respected that distinction. It upheld opening international mail to look for contraband, but the regulations before the court flatly prohibited reading correspondence without a warrant, a point the justices stressed repeatedly. The Court has never held that border agents may read a traveler’s papers without a warrant. A phone holds years of correspondence. It deserves at least the same protection the Founders gave a sealed envelope.

Last month, however, the 2nd Circuit joined those courts that have disregarded this tradition. In United States v. Alisigwe, Judge Steven Menashi wrote that agents need no suspicion whatsoever to search a traveler’s property at the border, phones included. A border search becomes non-routine, he reasoned, only when it intrudes on the person, as a strip search does. A phone is property, so searching it is routine.

Judge Eunice Lee concurred, agreeing that no warrant was required. But she warned that the majority’s rule permits suspicionless searches for any reason, “including political or discriminatory ones.”

The Alisigwe majority’s premise miscasts the Fourth Amendment. The amendment’s text secures “persons, houses, papers, and effects” in a single, unranked list. The abuses that produced the amendment were searches of property, including private papers. Agents may properly physically examine a phone to ensure it’s not really a container for smuggling contraband. But reading or viewing its digital contents without a warrant trespasses on a person’s papers and effects. The framers protected property because they recognized that human beings are not ghosts: We live in the physical world by exercising our property rights, and so searching our property can reveal much about our lives.

Alisigwe is the latest word from a Court of Appeals, but it contains complications for the constitutional issue. The trial court found that agents had reasonable suspicion, so the no-suspicion holding arguably wasn’t needed to decide the case. That suspicion involved a forged passport, which goes to identity and admissibility, the core of border authority. Finally, Alisigwe was a permanent resident, not a citizen, so the government’s interest in deciding who may enter was heightened.

Anibowei is simple on each of these counts, which is why one can be hopeful the Supreme Court will take it and address the Fourth Amendment question now. Anibowei is a naturalized citizen, no one suspects him of anything, and he challenges the government’s search policies directly rather than seeking suppression of evidence in a criminal case. As the 5th Circuit itself acknowledged, his case “turns squarely and solely” on the warrant question.

The stakes keep growing. In FY 2025, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) searched 55,318 electronic devices, nearly 11 times as many as in 2012—and nearly a quarter of those searches targeted U.S. citizens. According to the directives Anibowei challenges, agents may keep what they find and share it with federal, state, local, and foreign agencies. Investigators have learned to wait for a target to travel and ask CBP to search his phone on the way back in, rather than go to the trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. No wonder universities, bar associations, and press freedom groups now advise travelers to leave their devices at home.

The Founders rebelled against customs officers who could search wherever they pleased and read whatever they found. A rule letting border agents scroll through a citizen’s correspondence, photos, and client files without a warrant, or any suspicion at all, revives that power. The Supreme Court should take Anibowei’s case. Our papers don’t lose Fourth Amendment protections at the border just because they’re digital.

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TV Networks Protested Press Bans by Declining To Cover Trump. That Might Have Been Illegal, the DOJ Says.


Press microphones in front of the White House | Valentin M Armianu/Picsfive/Dreamstime/CNN/MS NOW/Politico

After President Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House last month, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News protested by suspending their participation in the press pool that provides widely used video of presidential events. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which last Friday demanded network communications regarding the TV pool, that show of solidarity may have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The antitrust investigation adds another layer of bullying to Trump’s vendetta against “Fake News Media Outlets.” The president reflexively threatens to yank broadcast licenses in response to news coverage he views as biased against him. He has repeatedly tried to punish disfavored journalists by excluding them from the White House, culminating in last month’s sanctions against CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, which irked him by running “purposely negative stories.” Now he is deploying the Justice Department against the TV networks that objected to his assault on freedom of the press.

Under a longstanding arrangement, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News take turns covering the president in venues where press access is limited, sharing the footage with other news outlets. But after Trump excluded CNN from that role, the other networks stopped participating. They resumed their coverage on September 25, the day after a federal judge ordered the White House to restore press passes for employees of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico.

The TV pool suspension was brief, lasting just four days. But it irritated Trump, who on September 24 complained that the networks “refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years”—i.e., “the arrival at the White House of the Highly Respected President of China, Xi Jinping, and his beautiful wife, Madam Peng.” That event was “magnificent” and “made for Television,” he said, but the networks “refused to be there” because “they knew how good it would be” and “didn’t want credit to be given to ‘TRUMP.'”

As the DOJ tells it, the lack of network coverage was not only annoying; it was also potentially illegal. “Members of the television press pool have boycotted covering White House events,” Emily Covington, who directs the department’s Office of Public Affairs, said on Saturday. “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” she added, and “the Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws.”

Section 1 of the Sherman Act broadly prohibits any “contract,” “combination,” or “conspiracy” in “restraint of trade.” But it applies to group boycotts only insofar as they aim to thwart competing businesses.

William E. Kovacic, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) during the George W. Bush administration, is skeptical that the concept applies in this case. “The critical ingredient in successful antitrust cases is to demonstrate that there is unmistakably a commercial motive and that the commercial motive predominates,” Kovacic told The New York Times. “And I don’t think they would ever be able to do that here.”

The Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in FTC v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association illustrates the importance of a “commercial motive.” The case involved attorneys in private practice who were paid to serve as court-appointed counsel for criminal defendants in the District of Columbia. The FTC concluded that they violated the Sherman Act when they agreed to stop accepting cases until their fees were increased.

Since that agreement was aimed at protecting the right to counsel by ensuring adequate funding for court-appointed attorneys, the lawyers association argued, it was protected under NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, a 1982 decision in which the Supreme Court recognized a First Amendment right to engage in politically motivated consumer boycotts. But the Court saw an important distinction between the two cases.

“Our reasoning in Claiborne Hardware is not applicable to a boycott conducted by business competitors who ‘stand to profit financially from a lessening of competition in the boycotted market,'” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote. “No matter how altruistic the motives of respondents may have been, it is undisputed that their immediate objective was to increase the price that they would be paid for their services.”

In Claiborne Hardware, by contrast, the boycotters were not trying to reap a financial benefit by reducing competition. Nor were ABC et al. when they “boycotted” the White House TV pool. They were not trying to increase their profits by putting competitors at a disadvantage; they were standing up for freedom of the press.

“The investigation is nonsense,” Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, says in an emailed press release. “Trump may view the presidency as a business venture, but news outlets’ standing up for their constitutional rights has nothing to do with antitrust law….Depriving Trump of the attention he craves is not a competitive harm.”

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Thinking of Sending a Nude Shrek Pic to an Ohio Official? You Could Be Found Guilty of Harassment.


Shrek | Midjourney/New Africa/Magnific/Adobe Firefly/Mariam Zakaidze

A text message containing an image of nude Shrek holding his ogre…appendage…loomed over an Ohio courtroom on Friday, during the prosecution’s closing argument in a two-day trial that captured the attention of Ohioans, free speech advocates, and the national media.

“The question is whether you should be entitled to a little bit of privacy and not sent that message,” said prosecutor Matthew Lallo.

The message at the center of this trial was sent by Ohio Substack writer D.J. Byrnes (a.k.a. “The Rooster“). Back in May, the blogger sent the racy image of Shrek to state Sen. Jerry Cirino (R–Kirtland). According to Signal Ohio, the blogger was arrested on June 1 after Cirino reported the messages to the Kirtland Police Department. The outlet reported that Byrnes spent 23 hours in jail before posting bail on a misdemeanor telecommunications harassment charge. 

According to The New York Times, Byrnes sent the “gloating text messages” after Cirino announced he would no longer run as state Senate president. 

An accompanying text to Cirino said, “Good to see you finally made your final humiliation public, Young Mussolini!” Byrnes’ message also added, “THE PATRIOTS CAUCUS sends its regards!!!!!!!!!!!”  

During Byrnes’ trial, which began on Thursday, his defense team argued that the texts were intended as political statements, and they did not constitute harassment. The defense emphasized that Byrnes had frequently criticized Cirino in the past, and the texts were sent in the context of Cirino withdrawing from his bid for state Senate president. 

“The point is clear,” said Byrnes’ attorney during closing statements. “Shrek was exposing himself and so was Senator Cirino, finally exposing himself as he couldn’t win the presidency even though months earlier he had predicted that it would be wrapped up by March.” 

On Friday, the jury sided with the prosecution, finding Byrnes guilty of telecommunications harassment. Byrnes was sentenced to pay court costs and a $200 fine, reported The Ohio Capital Journal.  

“This wasn’t a free speech issue; this was a harassment statute that I believed he was in violation of,” Cirino said after the verdict, according to the outlet. 

On Monday, Axios reported that the judge barred Byrnes from raising a First Amendment defense in the trial, “leaving the defense to argue that Byrnes’ messages did not satisfy the statutory definition of harassment.” 

Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tells Reason he was not surprised by the verdict given the “broad and vague language of Ohio’s telecommunications harassment statute.” The statute, he notes, “criminalizes sending even a single electronic communication ‘with purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse’ the recipient,” which “sweeps in a vast amount of constitutionally protected speech.”

“It’s easy to imagine the same law being used to prosecute social media users who reply to government officials’ posts with harsh or vulgar criticism,” he says. “If Byrnes appeals, he should and likely will challenge the law’s constitutionality.”

And the Shrek saga does not seem to be over. According to Axios, Byrnes has “confirmed plans to appeal the ruling.” What began as a “Shrext” may end up becoming a serious free speech matter for Ohio’s appellate courts. 

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Release the Kelly Clarkson Tapes


Kelly Clarkson holds a microphone as Molly, the animatronic bird from Art of Play, perches on her hand | Lev Radin/Sipa USA/Newscom

Pretty Woman is the best romantic comedy of all time. In it, the actress Julia Roberts plays Vivian, a Los Angeles prostitute who stumbles into a weeklong escort gig for a well-to-do businessman. This requires a new wardrobe, ideally something where her legs are covered less by thigh-high boots and more by, well, actual clothes. Upon entering a shop on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, it is quickly apparent she is not welcome.

She later returns—this time looking less hooker with a heart of gold, more polo match—to deliver one of the more legendary lines in movie history. “Big mistake,” she tells the saleswoman who spurned her, flexing her shopping bags full of spoils. “Big. HUGE!”

Life imitates art; art imitates life. Accordingly, we now have a new Vivian, updated for the 21st century: an American Idol winner shopping not for Chanel and Valentino but for a yellow animatronic bird (naturally). This not being 1990, she also has social media.

“Just drove all the way to Brooklyn to check out this store I thought looked really rad and had a few things in mind to buy and literally was looked at as if I couldn’t afford it and was told he could find something comparable for me,” the singer Kelly Clarkson wrote on X. “Wow, dude. You’re an idiot and just lost a huge sale. But y’all should go check out Art of Play in Brooklyn if you enjoy being treated like Julia Roberts [sic] character in Pretty Woman.”

As of this writing, that post has been seen about 44 million times. It has inspired a news cycle, a public response from Art of Play, a counter-response from Clarkson, a counter-counter-response from Art of Play, and a lot of negative online reviews from people who have probably never been. It is a stark example of how Vivians of times past have been brought into the present. A comeuppance moment—”Big mistake!”—in response to an unpleasant experience with an allegedly rude employee can now become a national story that puts a small business in the crosshairs or the limelight, depending on whom you ask.

Some additional details, for your edification: The store noted that Clarkson wanted “Molly,” that crooning fowl, which “is permanently attached to the wall and isn’t for sale.” Drat. Clarkson: “So the whole conversation we had when I asked you if it was for sale whilst pointing to the price tag hanging on the wall with the title Singing Bird didn’t happen as you elevator eyed me saying in a condescending tone ‘yes, it’s for sale but it costs 15,000 dollars so if you’d like me to find something comparable for you I can.’ That all never happened and now it’s not for sale.”

Now we’re really cooking. The store: “We explained that while Molly is permanently attached to the wall and serves as a de facto mascot for our shop, a nearly identical automaton is owned by the creator of the machines, a brilliant artist named Bliss Kolb who lives in Seattle. He told us he would be willing to part with Molly’s twin for $15,000.” Art of Play also said it “explained all of this to Kelly Clarkson” and “offered to show her a different singing bird automaton…that she could have taken home with her that day” for the low, low price of $2,000. A steal. But, alas, “She did not stick around long enough to see it.”

So we have overlapping but ultimately divergent accounts of this era-defining, avian warfare, which was almost certainly captured by a camera on the ceiling. Curious.

Let us acknowledge a few things. For one: How iconic is it that Clarkson prefaced her beef with the fact that she “drove all the way to Brooklyn,” likely from Manhattan (where she keeps an apartment), as if she had just crossed the Darién Gap? We’re talking approximately 35 minutes from Central Park to Cobble Hill. There is a storied history of extreme melodrama in great American cities when traversing neighborhood boundaries—try convincing an Angeleno to leave West Hollywood for lunch in Koreatown. Clarkson is truly an American idol.

For two: Why are we as a nation litigating a pop star’s journey to buy a warbling robot? I now know as much about the origin story of Molly—the bird that broke America—as I do my sister’s, who shares the same name. (It’s a good name.) I will give Clarkson the benefit of the doubt that this employee may have been less than bubbly. It is Brooklyn, after all, where icy customer service from women with very short bangs and vocal fry is sometimes seen as an asset. But did we really need to mobilize millions of people against a random toy store because of an unfortunate five-minute exchange? Could Clarkson not have left a Google review? (Speaking of those, the fakes have been steadily disappearing, although a new evaluation from “Baba Baka” instructs users not to patronize the store because the owner “called me slurs.” I have my doubts.)

What made Vivian’s moment on Rodeo Drive so captivating? It was personal. She marches into the store—eyes trained on the elitist clerk with the braided updo, the short bangs of the late ’80s and early ’90s—and tells it like it is. She does not marshal all of Los Angeles into the store to do it with her.

Clarkson has the right, of course, to say whatever she wants, however she wants. But that does not necessarily make it wise. Her effort legitimately may backfire—despite the avalanche of online hate, Art of Play has gained thousands of social media followers and will likely become a brief destination, even out of morbid fascination. In general, though, unbecoming moments and misunderstandings between individuals do not need to become seismic—and potentially life-ruining—national affairs, as we’ve seen happen from time to time over the last several years. We can turn back.

Not this time, though. It’s too late. The nation has been brought into the discussion, and the nation therefore needs closure. Art of Play is thus cosmically obligated to release security footage of the exchange. Was Clarkson more Vivian Ward or Veruca Salt? ROLL THE TAPES!

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DHS Searched Ilhan Omar’s Home as Part of Immigration Fraud Investigation


Ilhan Omar | Illustration: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom.

On Monday, CBS News reported that federal agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.), as part of an ongoing investigation that “centers on Omar’s immigration paperwork.” 

In a statement to the Associated Press, the Justice Department said agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)—an office within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that conducts federal criminal investigations into immigration fraud and identity and benefits fraud—”executed a judicially authorized search warrant” as “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” 

The search warrant reportedly “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 The New York Times. The Times reported that federal officials are also investigating “whether Ms. Omar derived citizenship from a father who may have been ineligible to obtain naturalized status.” In a statement, Omar called the investigation an “outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies,” stating she did “nothing wrong.”

Omar has been in the Justice Department’s crosshairs since January, when President Donald Trump announced that the department and Congress were “looking at ‘Congresswoman’ Illhan Omar, who left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars.” 

Trump was referencing an investigation by the House Ethics Committee, based on a 2025 financial disclosure form showing she and her husband held assets worth between $6 million and $30 million, a notable increase from her previous filings. Omar later filed an amended disclosure form that showed the assets were worth $18,004 to $95,000 after accounting for liabilities. However, in September, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Office of Congressional Conduct—which reviews allegations against House members and their staff—voted 5–1 to recommend that the House Ethics Committee dismiss the allegations. Per the Journal, investigators found no “substantial reason to believe that Rep. Omar reported false or incomplete information in her financial disclosures.” Omar’s office told the Journal she didn’t catch the errors, which stemmed from erroneous valuations of her husband’s businesses, because she “isn’t involved in her husband’s businesses and trusted the accountant involved.”

The investigation into Omar appears to be part and parcel of the Trump administration’s weaponization of government—which the president vowed to end—adding to a list of cases that includes former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, former FBI Director James Comey, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

Omar’s opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts, particularly in her home state of Minnesota, and her Somali heritage have made her a frequent target of the president and his allies. 

Last December, a federal indictment revealed a nearly $9 billion fraud scandal in Minnesota, much of it tied to the state’s Somali immigrants. In March, Vice President J.D. Vance—who leads the Trump administration’s anti-fraud task force—told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson that Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America.” Vance accused Omar of “being at the center of a lot of the worst fraudsters in the Somali community.” 

Vance doubled down in May, telling White House reporters the immigration fraud allegations were “something that the Department of Justice is looking at right now.” He appeared to pull back from his March claim that he was certain Omar had committed immigration fraud, instead stating that while he didn’t want to “prejudge an investigation,” it “certainly seems like something fishy is there.”

In September, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Johnson that the investigation into Omar was still “ongoing,” and that the department knew she had “married her brother to try to bring him into the United States.” Omar’s office has denied the accusations, which were first levied against her in 2016. 

Mullin claims the investigation into Omar is “not political.” He could be telling the truth; federal investigators have scrutinized Omar before. In 2024, the Biden administration’s Justice Department opened an investigation into Omar’s “finances, campaign spending and interactions with a foreign citizen,” according to The New York Times. Per the Times, the investigation eventually “stalled for lack of evidence.” 

But Mullin’s words are also hard to take at face value. Despite denying accusations of weaponizing the justice system, the Trump administration has time and again used dubious legal reasoning to investigate the president’s political enemies. This includes New York Attorney General Letitia James, who, after successfully suing Trump for financial fraud, was indicted for mortgage fraud by Trump’s Justice Department, which used the same petty justification on her. 

The president has also continued a campaign to indict Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, announcing last week that the White House would hold in-person hearings to look into claims she committed mortgage fraud. Ousting Cook would ostensibly allow the president to install a Fed governor aligned with his priorities. It’s a tactic that failed Trump once before, when his Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for his handling of renovations at the central bank’s headquarters. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, dropped the probe in April, and the department ultimately found nothing criminal in Powell’s conduct.

An investigation will reveal whether Omar broke the law. Still, if it’s anything like the Trump administration’s previous efforts, the investigation is likely driven by political animus, not criminal behavior.

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Are Warrantless Phone Searches at the Border Constitutional? The Supreme Court May Soon Decide.


Border phone search | Tatiana Chekryzhova/Dreamstime/rudenkoalla/Magnific/Mariam Zakaidze

George Anibowei, a U.S. citizen, is a Texas-based immigration attorney with many clients battling the Department of Homeland Security. Border agents have searched his phone at least five times without a warrant as he returned to the United States.

In the first search, agents copied the phone’s entire contents, including his confidential communications with clients. The government still has that data, and Anibowei still doesn’t know why it was kept or who has seen it. He now leaves his work phone at home when he travels.

On September 29, the Supreme Court asked the federal government to respond to Anibowei’s petition, which asks whether the Fourth Amendment lets border agents search the contents of a phone without a warrant. (I’m one of his lawyers.) The government waived its response, expecting the Court would deny the petition without a second look.

But in 2021, the solicitor general told the Court that this very question had produced an “entrenched circuit conflict” of “considerable practical importance.” The conflict has only deepened since. Seven federal appeals courts now hold that a warrant is never required to search a phone at the border, while the 4th and 9th Circuits require one in at least some cases. That means one of your constitutional rights currently depends on which airport you fly into.

While circuit courts may disagree, the Supreme Court has already shown the best answer for this question. In Riley v. California (2014), the Court unanimously held that police generally need a warrant to search the phone of someone they arrest. There is an exception for searches incident to arrest, which allows the police to arrest someone without a warrant; that exists to protect officers and preserve evidence. Data can’t hurt an officer, and a phone can be secured while police get a warrant. An extension of an old exception to digital data, the court said, “has to rest on its own bottom.” Treating a phone like any other container in an arrestee’s pockets was like saying “a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon.”

The border-search exception fails the same test. Those searches exist to collect duties, keep out people who may not enter, and stop contraband. But duties attach to physical goods, not data. And as the legal scholar Orin Kerr has put it, agents “will not find a person smuggled inside a computer hard drive.” As for digital contraband, anyone who wants illicit files can carry a clean phone and download them after clearing customs. Suspicionless phone searches burden millions of innocent travelers while barely inconveniencing smugglers.

The appeals courts that disagree mostly cite one another. But the Supreme Court rejected a lopsided lower-court consensus in Riley, and again in Carpenter v. United States (2018). Counting courts is not a constitutional argument.

Defenders of these searches lean on history. In United States v. Ramsey (1977), the Court noted that the first Congress authorized warrantless customs searches in 1789, less than two months before it proposed the Fourth Amendment. True enough. But that statute let officers search ships for hidden dutiable goods. To search a house, store, or other building for the same goods, officers needed a warrant. And nothing in the statute let officers read a traveler’s papers.

That distinction was no accident. Customs abuses had helped spark the Revolution. Writs of assistance gave British customs officers blanket authority to search wherever they pleased, which James Otis said placed “the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” And the founding generation guarded letters especially closely. Benjamin Franklin, as the first postmaster general, made postal workers swear they would not open mail without an express written warrant.

Even Ramsey, the government’s favorite border search precedent, respected that distinction. It upheld opening international mail to look for contraband, but the regulations before the court flatly prohibited reading correspondence without a warrant, a point the justices stressed repeatedly. The Court has never held that border agents may read a traveler’s papers without a warrant. A phone holds years of correspondence. It deserves at least the same protection the Founders gave a sealed envelope.

Last month, however, the 2nd Circuit joined those courts that have disregarded this tradition. In United States v. Alisigwe, Judge Steven Menashi wrote that agents need no suspicion whatsoever to search a traveler’s property at the border, phones included. A border search becomes non-routine, he reasoned, only when it intrudes on the person, as a strip search does. A phone is property, so searching it is routine.

Judge Eunice Lee concurred, agreeing that no warrant was required. But she warned that the majority’s rule permits suspicionless searches for any reason, “including political or discriminatory ones.”

The Alisigwe majority’s premise miscasts the Fourth Amendment. The amendment’s text secures “persons, houses, papers, and effects” in a single, unranked list. The abuses that produced the amendment were searches of property, including private papers. Agents may properly physically examine a phone to ensure it’s not really a container for smuggling contraband. But reading or viewing its digital contents without a warrant trespasses on a person’s papers and effects. The framers protected property because they recognized that human beings are not ghosts: We live in the physical world by exercising our property rights, and so searching our property can reveal much about our lives.

Alisigwe is the latest word from a Court of Appeals, but it contains complications for the constitutional issue. The trial court found that agents had reasonable suspicion, so the no-suspicion holding arguably wasn’t needed to decide the case. That suspicion involved a forged passport, which goes to identity and admissibility, the core of border authority. Finally, Alisigwe was a permanent resident, not a citizen, so the government’s interest in deciding who may enter was heightened.

Anibowei is simple on each of these counts, which is why one can be hopeful the Supreme Court will take it and address the Fourth Amendment question now. Anibowei is a naturalized citizen, no one suspects him of anything, and he challenges the government’s search policies directly rather than seeking suppression of evidence in a criminal case. As the 5th Circuit itself acknowledged, his case “turns squarely and solely” on the warrant question.

The stakes keep growing. In FY 2025, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) searched 55,318 electronic devices, nearly 11 times as many as in 2012—and nearly a quarter of those searches targeted U.S. citizens. According to the directives Anibowei challenges, agents may keep what they find and share it with federal, state, local, and foreign agencies. Investigators have learned to wait for a target to travel and ask CBP to search his phone on the way back in, rather than go to the trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. No wonder universities, bar associations, and press freedom groups now advise travelers to leave their devices at home.

The Founders rebelled against customs officers who could search wherever they pleased and read whatever they found. A rule letting border agents scroll through a citizen’s correspondence, photos, and client files without a warrant, or any suspicion at all, revives that power. The Supreme Court should take Anibowei’s case. Our papers don’t lose Fourth Amendment protections at the border just because they’re digital.

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TV Networks Protested Press Bans by Declining To Cover Trump. That Might Have Been Illegal, the DOJ Says.


Press microphones in front of the White House | Valentin M Armianu/Picsfive/Dreamstime/CNN/MS NOW/Politico

After President Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House last month, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News protested by suspending their participation in the press pool that provides widely used video of presidential events. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which last Friday demanded network communications regarding the TV pool, that show of solidarity may have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The antitrust investigation adds another layer of bullying to Trump’s vendetta against “Fake News Media Outlets.” The president reflexively threatens to yank broadcast licenses in response to news coverage he views as biased against him. He has repeatedly tried to punish disfavored journalists by excluding them from the White House, culminating in last month’s sanctions against CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, which irked him by running “purposely negative stories.” Now he is deploying the Justice Department against the TV networks that objected to his assault on freedom of the press.

Under a longstanding arrangement, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News take turns covering the president in venues where press access is limited, sharing the footage with other news outlets. But after Trump excluded CNN from that role, the other networks stopped participating. They resumed their coverage on September 25, the day after a federal judge ordered the White House to restore press passes for employees of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico.

The TV pool suspension was brief, lasting just four days. But it irritated Trump, who on September 24 complained that the networks “refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years”—i.e., “the arrival at the White House of the Highly Respected President of China, Xi Jinping, and his beautiful wife, Madam Peng.” That event was “magnificent” and “made for Television,” he said, but the networks “refused to be there” because “they knew how good it would be” and “didn’t want credit to be given to ‘TRUMP.'”

As the DOJ tells it, the lack of network coverage was not only annoying; it was also potentially illegal. “Members of the television press pool have boycotted covering White House events,” Emily Covington, who directs the department’s Office of Public Affairs, said on Saturday. “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” she added, and “the Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws.”

Section 1 of the Sherman Act broadly prohibits any “contract,” “combination,” or “conspiracy” in “restraint of trade.” But it applies to group boycotts only insofar as they aim to thwart competing businesses.

William E. Kovacic, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) during the George W. Bush administration, is skeptical that the concept applies in this case. “The critical ingredient in successful antitrust cases is to demonstrate that there is unmistakably a commercial motive and that the commercial motive predominates,” Kovacic told The New York Times. “And I don’t think they would ever be able to do that here.”

The Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in FTC v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association illustrates the importance of a “commercial motive.” The case involved attorneys in private practice who were paid to serve as court-appointed counsel for criminal defendants in the District of Columbia. The FTC concluded that they violated the Sherman Act when they agreed to stop accepting cases until their fees were increased.

Since that agreement was aimed at protecting the right to counsel by ensuring adequate funding for court-appointed attorneys, the lawyers association argued, it was protected under NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, a 1982 decision in which the Supreme Court recognized a First Amendment right to engage in politically motivated consumer boycotts. But the Court saw an important distinction between the two cases.

“Our reasoning in Claiborne Hardware is not applicable to a boycott conducted by business competitors who ‘stand to profit financially from a lessening of competition in the boycotted market,'” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote. “No matter how altruistic the motives of respondents may have been, it is undisputed that their immediate objective was to increase the price that they would be paid for their services.”

In Claiborne Hardware, by contrast, the boycotters were not trying to reap a financial benefit by reducing competition. Nor were ABC et al. when they “boycotted” the White House TV pool. They were not trying to increase their profits by putting competitors at a disadvantage; they were standing up for freedom of the press.

“The investigation is nonsense,” Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, says in an emailed press release. “Trump may view the presidency as a business venture, but news outlets’ standing up for their constitutional rights has nothing to do with antitrust law….Depriving Trump of the attention he craves is not a competitive harm.”

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The Forgotten Origins of Columbus Day

Contemporary controversy over Columbus Day tends to focus on Christopher Columbus himself, and in particular on the treatment of Native Americans that followed European colonization. Somewhat lost in the controversy is why Columbus Day became an important American holiday in the first place: in significant part, it was a response to the severe discrimination faced by Italian immigrants.

The relevant history begins with large-scale immigration of Italians to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Italians, especially Sicilians and other southern Italians, were widely viewed as culturally and sometimes inferior, prone to criminality, and incapable of assimilating into American society.

The most infamous manifestation of anti-Italian hostility occurred in New Orleans in 1891. After Police Chief David Hennessy was murdered, a group of Italians was prosecuted for the crime. The trial failed to produce the expected convictions. On March 14, 1891, a mob broke into the jail and killed eleven of the Italian defendants and prisoners. Some had been acquitted and others had not yet been tried. The Italian consul described them at the time as “defenseless Italian prisoners.”

The lynching caused a major diplomatic crisis. Italy withdrew its minister from Washington, and in April 1892 the Harrison administration paid 125,000 francs to Italy for distribution to the victims’ families. Secretary of State James Blaine expressed the hope that this would end the dispute and restore friendly relations between the two countries.

Six months later, on the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed a nationwide Columbus Day observance.

Harrison did not invent the idea of celebrating Columbus. Americans had commemorated Columbus long before the 1890s, and the four-hundredth anniversary would have been a major event regardless of the controversy over Italian immigration. So it would be too strong to say that the New Orleans lynching caused Columbus Day.

But the connection between the rise of Columbus Day and the status of Italian Americans is nevertheless important. Columbus provided Italian immigrants with a particularly useful American hero. At a time when Italians were commonly portrayed as undesirable foreigners who could never become real Americans, Italian Americans could point out that an Italian stood at the traditional beginning of the American story.

Italian-American organizations accordingly made Columbus celebrations a major vehicle for ethnic pride and assimilation. In New York, Italian Americans raised the money for the Columbus monument at Columbus Circle, dedicated in October 1892. Columbus Day parades combined Italian ethnic pride with conspicuous displays of American patriotism.

Anti-Italian prejudice, meanwhile, continued well beyond the 1890s. Immigration restrictionists commonly portrayed southern Italians as inferior and inherently prone to criminality, and the immigration restrictions enacted in the 1920s drastically reduced Italian immigration.

Columbus Day gradually became institutionalized. Franklin Roosevelt established an annual federal Columbus Day observance in the 1930s. Italian-American organizations then spent years lobbying to make it a federal holiday. Congress finally did so in 1968 as part of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. The National Archives’ history of the legislation specifically notes that making Columbus Day a federal holiday had been “a goal sought for years by Italian-American groups.”

None of this tells us what to think of Columbus himself. There is much greater awareness today, appropriately, of the terrible treatment of Native Americans following European colonization. But that increased awareness has tended to obscure a very different part of the history of Columbus Day.

For Italian immigrants and their descendants, Columbus Day was not simply a celebration of European conquest. It was also part of an effort to gain acceptance for an immigrant group that faced widespread prejudice and, sometimes, horrific violence. Whatever one thinks of Columbus, that history is worth remembering.

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Michigan Congressman Proposes Using Tariff Revenue for Tariff Relief Fund


President Donald Trump on the left and Rep. John James on the right | Chris Kleponis - CNP/Polaris/Newscom/Wikimedia Commons

The Republican congressman who hopes to be the next governor of Michigan has a plan to help American businesses hurt by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Is he proposing to abolish those tariffs? Hahahaha, oh please. 

Instead, Rep. John James (R–Mich.) has introduced a bill that would use some tariff revenue to offset the economic harm being caused by…the tariffs.

James’ proposal, the Tariff Relief for American Development and Employment Act of 2026, would create a new tariff relief fund to be accessed by American businesses that “demonstrate actual tariff-related economic injury.”

“Michigan is disproportionally affected by the trade war, so it’s reasonable to use tariff revenue to reduce the effect on Michigan businesses and workers,” James said in a statement announcing the legislation.

To qualify for the money, businesses would also have to pledge to maintain existing production and employment levels. The bill instructs the Treasury Department, which would administer the fund, to give priority to businesses with larger numbers of American workers and those that avoid layoffs and boost worker pay.

In other words: Pay the tariffs first, then do a bunch of paperwork and cross your fingers that the bureaucrats at the Treasury decide that you qualify for reimbursement. And in the meantime, don’t cut production or lay off workers—things a business might naturally do in response to a new tax burden—or the federal overseers might not favor you.

“You guys remember when Republicans used to criticize Democrats for imposing costly, convoluted taxes and then giving some Americans their own money back?” asks Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics at the Cato Institute, in response to James’ proposal. Indeed.

For that matter, remember when Republicans understood that concentrating more economic decision-making power in Washington wasn’t the way to help American businesses? This bill requires businesses to jump through a series of hoops—a process that will add more costs and complexity on top of the tariffs—and creates more incentives for executives to work harder at currying favor in Washington rather than succeeding in the marketplace.

The fact that James is running for governor in Michigan—and trailing in the polls—likely sheds some light on his motivations here.

This does not seem like a bill meant for Congress to seriously consider or pass. In all likelihood, it exists solely so James can tell voters in Michigan that he’s trying to ease the pain caused by Trump’s tariffs—which are deeply unpopular and increasingly seem to be strangling the GOP’s prospects in the midterms.

In Michigan, manufacturing employment has declined since April 2025, when Trump launched his second-term tariffs on what the White House dubbed “Liberation Day.” Meanwhile, Michigan households have paid more than $23 billion in tariff-related costs since January 2025, according to a tracker maintained by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

By acknowledging that the tariffs are hurting businesses in Michigan, James becomes the latest Republican to openly break with the president over his signature policy. Former congressman Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in Michigan, has TV ads calling for an end to what he calls the “tariff war.”

It is good that Republicans are finally admitting the reality of the tariffs. Study after study has shown that the import taxes are imposing costs on American businesses and consumers. Last week, the New York Federal Reserve concluded that the average price of 67 common household goods would have fallen over the past year, if not for the tariffs. Instead, those prices increased by about 3 percent.

Fixing that requires repealing Trump’s tariffs, rather than constructing a new labyrinthine process for funneling some of the tariff money back to certain businesses.

James’ bill is a deeply silly proposal, but there’s also something quite pathetic about this. James is, after all, a member of Congress. You know, the branch of government that the U.S. Constitution vests with control over trade and tariffs. You don’t need to build a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine to “reduce the effect [of tariffs] on Michigan businesses and workers.”

You just have to do your constitutionally appointed job and tell the president that he can’t unilaterally raise taxes on Americans whenever the mood strikes.

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