Ilhan Omar Immigration Probe: Report Details Deadly Four-Day Boat Journey From Africa

Ilhan Omar’s family undertook a perilous four-day voyage by sea, a journey that reportedly claimed dozens of lives, as they fled Somalia’s civil war on the first stage of their eventual journey to the United States, according to an account that has brought renewed attention to her immigration history.

Omar, now the representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, left Somalia with her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, when she was about eight years old. The pair reportedly boarded a traditional wooden dhow while fleeing a militia during the collapse of Somalia in 1991.

Her mother, Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein, died when Omar was two. As the youngest of seven children, Omar was raised by her father and grandfather. She has previously said the family fled together after armed attackers stormed their compound.

After crossing waters around the Horn of Africa, the family reached the northern Kenyan port of Malindi alongside dozens of other refugees. The voyage was marked by tragedy, with several boats sinking and more than 100 people reported dead.

Omar’s father, a former army officer, was reportedly being hunted by Hawiye militiamen who had overthrown Siad Barre. The dictator’s forces were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians during the late 1980s.

Nurien Hatimy, a former Kenyan engineer who helped establish the refugee camp where the family stayed, has now described how they were forced to escape as Mogadishu descended into chaos.

“In one boat, 120 people drowned. Nobody was rescued,” Hatimy told Our News Outlet, recalling the dangerous sea crossings undertaken by refugees fleeing Somalia.

Omar’s childhood and immigration records are now being examined as part of a federal criminal investigation. Department of Homeland Security officials are looking into whether her late father provided false information or left out details on immigration documents.

The discrepancy over Omar’s year of birth is at the heart of the investigation. Official records have variously identified her as being born in 1981 and 1982, while her congressional staff changed the Minnesota legislature biography to show 1982 in 2019.

That distinction could be important because Omar has said she became a US citizen through her father’s naturalization in 2000, when she was 17. Under the relevant rules, that pathway was not available to someone who was already 18.

Questions have also persisted about Omar’s 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen whom some have alleged was her brother. Omar has rejected that claim.

Federal agents searched her Washington, DC, home last week and took her phone and passport, according to reports.

Omar condemned the search, describing it as an effort to pursue political opponents and turn federal law enforcement into a political weapon.

Speaking in a fundraising video released Tuesday night, roughly two weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, she told supporters: “We’re not going to be intimidated. We’re not going to be silenced.”

President Donald Trump denied involvement in the investigation. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ. I have nothing to do with it,” he told reporters at the White House.

Hatimy said that when rebels seized control of Mogadishu, members of Omar’s Daroodi tribe had little choice but to attempt the hazardous sea journey. Commercial flights from the capital had been suspended, leaving the coast as one of the few possible escape routes.

Two years afterward, Mogadishu was again thrust into the global spotlight during the battle later portrayed in Black Hawk Down. Eighteen US soldiers died in the fighting against forces loyal to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

Hatimy was directly involved with the construction of the Utange refugee camp outside Mombasa, where he took a direct interest in the welfare of the occupants – including Omar’s family.

They are believed to have boarded a dhow, the sort of traditional vessel that has sailed the Red Sea for hundreds of years, at the Somali port of Barawa in early 1991. 

Hatimy explained: ‘Some of the refugees from Barawa, including members of the Daroodi tribe, fled to Kenya by road and by sea as there were no airlines operating in that country to help anybody escape the civil war.

‘Unluckily, some boats capsized in the sea during the four-day journey, leaving most of passengers drowned … This was the case with many boats at the height of the time great exodus from Somalia.’

Hatimy, who is a part of an ethnic Somali community in Kenya, recalled how Ilhan’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, and his family were lucky to have survived the journey and that their boat docked at the Indian Ocean port of Malindi.

The family were initially housed at the small St Anne transit camp in Mombasa and then moved to the bigger Utange camp outside the city.

Omar and her family were finally settled at the huge Dadaab refugee complex in the arid north of the country, where more than 400,000 mostly Somali refugees were held.

Hatimy said that he could not recall how many children Nur Omar Mohamed had with him, but he remembered a young girl of about eight years old who used to follow him during the distribution of food at the camp. 

‘I cannot recall the name of any child of Nur Omar Mohamed, but what I still remember is that he was one of the former ruling class who had taken refuge in Kenya and had to run away from the Hawiye tribe militia which had seized power,’ Hatimy said.

As part of an ethnic Somali community, Hatimy worked closely with the Mombasa governor Shariff Nassir to welcome refugees fleeing the civil war, arriving at the ancient city of Mombasa and other ports by fishing dhows.

Hatimy used his engineering skills to plan and construct the Utange Refugee Camp in Mombasa for Somali refugees in 1991.

He said that, like other refugees who made their way to other countries, Omar should count herself lucky that their boats managed to reach Kenya, because many did not survive the journey. 

Nur Omar Mohamed was among hundreds of thousands of refugees who were given identity cards and taken to the sprawling Dadaab camp with his children, where a US agent working with the United Nations offered him and his family sanctuary.

The family arrived in the US in March 1995, when Omar was 12, settling first in Arlington, Virginia, before moving to the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis in 1997.

Her father drove a taxi and later worked for the US Postal Service.

Omar has described him as an educator, but Somali historian Mohamed Haji Ingiriis has described him as ‘a full colonel in Siad Barre’s military regime.’

He died of Covid complications in June 2020 at the age of 67.

Omar has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics, particularly over the president’s border crackdown which brought bloodshed to her home city Minneapolis earlier this year when two anti-ICE protesters were killed by federal agents. 

It is not the first time his government has examined her immigration history. Homeland Security Investigations looked into Omar in 2019 and found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing, a former official said last week.

Agents also seized DNA evidence in last week’s raid, according to Fox News, and more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas were issued, including to her older sister, Sahra Noor.

The DNA seizure puts fresh focus on the long-running claim that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, whom Omar married in 2009, is in fact her brother.

Elmi, who had been living in Britain, married Omar in 2009, a year after she says she split from Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her three children, whom she had wed in a religious ceremony in 2002. 

Sources told Our News Outlet that marriage was purely to allow Elmi to attend North Dakota State University, Omar’s alma mater. Omar says they split in 2011, but they did not divorce until 2017.

Omar reconciled with Hirsi in 2011 and had a third child with him in 2012, while still legally married to Elmi. She married Hirsi in a civil ceremony in January 2018, a month after divorcing Elmi. 

They divorced in 2019 after Hirsi found her lounging in pajamas with political consultant Tim Mynett at her Washington DC apartment.

Mynett, who she married in 2020, is also under scrutiny over his businesses. Omar’s disclosures valued his stakes in a winery and a venture capital firm at no more than $51,000 combined for 2023, then up to $30 million for 2024.

She later amended the filing to give both no net value, blaming an accounting error, but US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office is investigating the disclosures and the House Oversight Committee is examining the firms.

Abdihakim Osman Nur, a Minneapolis community leader, told Our News Outlet in 2020 that Omar and Hirsi had introduced Elmi to him as her brother. ‘She said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school,’ Nur said.

Despite both being Muslim, the couple were married by a Christian minister. ‘If they had gone to an imam he would have almost certainly have known if they were related,’ one Somali leader in Minnesota said.

Omar barely mentioned Elmi in her 2020 memoir, describing him as a man ‘whom I spent so little time with that I wouldn’t even make him a footnote in my story.’ He is now said to be back living in London.

‘We know that she married her brother to try to bring him into the United States,’ Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on a podcast in September. No evidence for that claim has been made public.

Omar, who denies wrongdoing and has not been charged, has called the claim ‘absurd and offensive.’