On Friday, Vice President JD Vance accused Representative Ilhan Omar of deceiving the United States by purportedly marrying her brother to facilitate his legal residency in the country.
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“We firmly believe Ilhan Omar engaged in immigration fraud against the United States,” Vance stated during his conversation with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on the most recent episode of Johnson’s show.
Omar has consistently dismissed these claims as “disgusting lies.” Her office did not immediately respond to requests for comments on the matter.
These accusations have persisted around the congresswoman since before her 2018 bid for the House of Representatives.
Omar has been married twice, to Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the latter of whom was accused over a decade ago of marrying her under dubious circumstances.
But Omar had married Hirsi in 2002 ceremony as part of her Islamic faith and applied for a state marriage license — but the two weren’t legally joined until January 2018, the Minnesota Star Tribune has reported.
The month before that, she dissolved her marriage with Elmi, a UK citizen, whom she had legally wed in February 2009 as part of a ceremony with a Christian minister in Eden Prairie, Minn., according to a Hennepin County marriage certificate previously obtained by The Post.
Omar has described the relationship as brief and that she and Elmi were separated for much of the time, except between 2009 and 2011. There’s no record of the two having children.
Hirsi and Omar had three kids together — in 2003, 2005, in June 2012, according to the Star Tribune, but that same month an Instagram photo seemingly showed Elmi holding a newborn girl with accompanying text referring to “nieces,” per the Star Tribune report.
That photo was subsequently deleted. Other allegations that Omar and Elmi were brother and sister first surfaced on a Somali politics discussion board called SomaliSpot — but were also deleted, according to City Journal.
While still a Minnesota state lawmaker, Omar said in 2016 that her marriage to Elmi was “a difficult part of my personal history that I did not consider relevant in the context of a political campaign.”
The Minneapolis-based Somali blogger and community leader Abdihakim Osman later told the Daily Mail in 2020 he knew Omar when the two were growing up in Minnesota — and she had introduced Elmi as her brother from London to Somali community members in the late 2000s.
Omar would tell people at the time that her sibling was looking for “papers,” referencing immigration documents such as a green card.
“No one knew there had been a wedding [to Elmi] until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later,” Osman, 45, told the Daily Mail.
Marriage fraud is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Vance added that he’s been discussing legal remedies with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, explaining that questions have been raised: “How do you go after her? How do you investigate her? How do you actually build the case to actually get some justice for the American people?”
The vice president claimed the Minnesota Democrat “has been at the center of a lot of the worst fraudsters in the Somalian community” — and that was also something that should be under investigation.
“I’m worried about the immigration,” Vance said. “I’m also worried about: What did Ilhan Omar know about what was happening in the Somali-American community? And why was nobody looking into it until, frankly, Donald Trump came along?”
Omar, who emigrated from Somalia, was 17 years old when she became a naturalized US citizen in 2000.
President Trump has also accused her of committing marriage fraud and called for the congresswoman to be thrown in prison over purported links to Somali fraudsters who bilked taxpayers out of $250 million in Minnesota.
The Trump administration has since launched several probes into allegedly fraudulent social service, child care and Medicaid programs in the state, which could top billions of dollars in lost taxpayer funds.
The Post also first reported on both congressional and federal probes of ties between Omar, her current husband Tim Mynett and their skyrocketing net worth.
As of 2024, congressional financial disclosures revealed the pair were worth up to $30 million in just a year after Mynett having reported being nearly broke in past House forms filed by his wife.
The couple wed in March 2020 after Mynett cheated on his wife of seven years with Omar, according to his ex-wife’s divorce court filings. Mynett served as one of Omar’s campaign officials when the affair blew up the marriage in 2019.
