A Look at U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Marriages and Personal Life

The early-morning Homeland Security raid at U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar’s Washington home on Monday was hardly unexpected, according to the reporter who has long covered the congresswoman’s personal life.

As the journalist behind many reports on Omar’s complicated marital history, I have anticipated such action since Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term.

The timing, however, was striking. The operation came just three weeks before the Minnesota Democrat’s November 3 re-election contest and appeared to conflict with an informal Justice Department practice of avoiding major actions involving political candidates within 60 days of an election.

Still, after years of the Trump administration challenging longstanding political and legal norms, few observers would have expected that convention to prevent the raid.

The central issue now is whether investigators have sufficient evidence to establish a claim reported repeatedly by me and Our News Outlet: that Ahmed Elmi, whom Omar married in February 2009, is her brother.

If federal officials substantiate that allegation, the administration could seek immigration consequences against Omar on the grounds that she violated immigration laws. Omar has not been convicted of such a violation.

I began reporting on Omar’s personal relationships in the summer of 2019, after receiving a tip that she had been seen at an Italian restaurant in the secluded Los Angeles neighborhood of Playa del Rey appearing close to a bespectacled man. Omar was married at the time.

The man was later identified as political consultant Tim Mynett, who was also married and had a teenage son.

The reporting subsequently generated additional tips about Omar’s relationships, particularly her February 2009 marriage to Elmi.

Abdihakim Osman Nur, a Minneapolis community leader, told me in 2020 that Omar and her then-husband Ahmed Hirsi—known by the nickname Southside—had introduced Elmi to him as Omar’s brother.

“He was very feminine in the way he dressed—he would wear light lipstick, pink clothes and very, very short shorts in the summer,” Nur said.

“People started whispering about him,” he added.

Our reporting also located a marriage-license application for Omar and Elmi filed at a Hennepin County office in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. The document listed Omar as 26 and Elmi as 23 at the time.

The application gave their address as Columbia Heights, Minnesota, while the wedding took place roughly 25 miles away in Eden Prairie, inside an unassuming single-story brick building that housed a county office and a library.

Although both were Muslim, the ceremony was performed by Wilecia Harris, a Christian minister. One Somali community leader in Minnesota suggested that an imam might have questioned whether the couple were related.

Harris, now 41, and Omar, 44, were both Muslim at the time, yet Harris conducted the ceremony. When contacted, Harris declined to explain why the couple had chosen her to officiate.

Harris’s husband, Marcus Harris, said: “My wife doesn’t want to be involved or interviewed about Congresswoman Omar. It’s not going to happen, not now and not ever.”

Nur also claimed the reason that the couple asked a Christian minister to officiate was because the imam at their local mosque in Minneapolis would have known they were siblings and refused to marry them.

‘She said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school,’ Nur told me. ‘We all thought she was just getting papers together to allow him to stay in this country.

‘Once she had the papers they could apply for student loans.

‘They both moved to North Dakota to go to school but she was still married to Southside. In the Somali way, the only marriage that mattered was the one in the mosque,’ he said.

Omar has had a complicated marital life. 

She wed Hirsi – the father of her daughters Isra and Ilwad, and son Adnan – in 2002, in a religious ceremony that was not recognized by law. Then, after supposedly splitting from him, she married Elmi, who had been living in Britain, in 2009.

According to my sources, that marriage was purely to allow Elmi to attend North Dakota State University – Omar’s own alma mater – and no one has ever suggested the marriage to her brother was consummated.

Instead, Omar continued to see Hirsi, having their third child, Ilwad, in 2012. She finally divorced Elmi in 2017, allowing her to marry Hirsi in a civil ceremony the following year, just before she was first elected to Congress.

But this time the marriage didn’t work out and she left him for good in 2019 – just five months before she married Mynett, who converted to Islam after they wed. 

The marriage effectively ended when Hirsi paid a visit to his wife’s Washington, DC apartment and found her and Mynett lounging around in pajamas – a strict no-no for Muslim women, who aren’t allowed to be alone with men who aren’t their husband or a close relative.

Hirsi had long suspected Omar was having an affair, and here was the proof. He went on to marry again just 37 days after their divorce went through.

Omar could have cleared up the whole story of her marriage to Elmi. But in her 2020 autobiography, This is What America Looks Like, she barely mentioned the incident at all.

She went into great detail about her family’s flight from war-torn Somalia to a refugee camp in Kenya, her move to the United States, and her rise through local Minnesota politics that led to to her 2018 election to the House of Representatives.

She even wrote about miscarrying twins during her marriage to Hirsi.

But when it came to her second marriage, details were scant, with Omar claiming instead that she had a ‘Britney Spears-style meltdown’ at the time.

‘I not only eloped with a man – whom I spent so little time with that I wouldn’t even make him a footnote in my story if it weren’t for the fact that this event turned into the main headline later on – but I shaved my head,’ she wrote. 

‘Yes, like the beleaguered pop star, who shaved her head in 2007, I took clippers to my own head.

‘Too many headaches, too little sleep – I had to flee myself, my relationships, my hair,’ she continued. 

‘The difference between Britney and me is that I wore a hijab, so nobody knew what I had done – except my children who were very surprised. ‘Mommy looks like me,’ Adnan [her son] declared. And he was right, I did look like a little boy.’

She wrote that, like Spears – who eloped with childhood friend Jason Alexander in 2004 only to have the marriage annulled after two days – ‘my impulsive second marriage ended in divorce’.

In the book, Omar only returned to the marriage when she discussed her election to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2016.

She said an anonymous post on a Somali website ‘established two simple facts, which were true, but that unleashed a torrent of speculation and conspiracies that follow me to this day.

‘They were that I had applied for a marriage license in 2002 and then again, in 2009, when I eloped.

‘These facts – which are true – were couched in speculation that I had married a relative illegally, to get him entry into the United States – which isn’t true.’

Omar says she has never been able to find out who posted the allegation. 

‘The blog post appeared on Somali Spot, an online Somali discussion forum,’ she wrote.

‘If someone had accurate information or true concerns that I had committed an immigration crime, they would have gone to the Star Tribune with it,’ she said, referring to the Minneapolis newspaper.

But time may now have run out for Omar and her attempts to bury the truth about her mysterious second husband, who is now said to be back living in London.

The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly focusing on immigration papers her late father completed on her behalf when she was a minor. 

Omar, who came to the US with her father in 1995, when she was 12 years old, became an American citizen at the age of 17. 

The raid on her home is a major escalation of an inquiry that DHS border czar Tom Homan first revealed in mid-September.

Pressed on whether Omar was under investigation, Homan refused to discuss specifics but warned: ‘No one’s above the law.’ He also declined to rule out stripping her of her American citizenship.

Days earlier, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the probe reached beyond the Congresswoman’s disputed second marriage and warned that removal actions could follow if wrongdoing is proven. 

Our News Outlet has contacted Omar’s office for comment on Monday’s raid.