A string of gang-related shootings in the Twin Cities suburbs this month has drawn sharp criticism of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., from her 2026 Republican challenger, who says the congresswoman has gone silent while violence tied to Somali-American gangs escalates in the district she represents.
Two teenagers were shot outside an Eden Prairie high school football game earlier this month. Days later, police recovered more than 100 shell casings in a Bloomington neighborhood after a separate shooting. Both Eden Prairie and Bloomington sit within Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, which Omar has represented since 2019.
John Nagel, a Minnesota native who spent 30 years as a state trooper before launching his campaign against Omar, told Fox News Digital that he has not seen the congresswoman respond to the violence.
“Where is Ilhan Omar in all of this?” Nagel said. “I would think that as a congressman that represents this particular area that she’d be at these meetings or she’d have a statement or she’d be sitting down and saying, ‘Hey, how can we help this? How could we stop this?’ And I don’t see her.”
Nagel has placed blame both on Omar and on the Democratic Party for what he describes as allowing Somali-American gang-linked violence to escalate across the Twin Cities. Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis and several of the affected suburbs, has seen rising concern among residents over gang activity in recent months.
Not everyone agrees on the cause. Stanford sociologist Tomás Jiménez pushed back on the idea that gang involvement among a subset of second-generation immigrants reflects a community-wide failure to assimilate.
“I would actually not think of it as, like, a failed assimilation, as much as a particular kind of assimilation,” Jiménez said.
Public records and reporting have not established the full scope of who is responsible for the Eden Prairie and Bloomington incidents, and law enforcement has not released findings tying either shooting to a specific gang or ethnic community. Gang violence and local crime response fall primarily under municipal and state authority rather than congressional jurisdiction, but Nagel argues Omar’s silence on the matter, given her prominence as a Somali-American officeholder, is notable.
Omar’s office has not issued a public statement addressing the Eden Prairie or Bloomington shootings as of this reporting. The race between Omar and Nagel is one of several closely watched contests in Minnesota ahead of the 2026 midterms.
