The Case Against Ilhan Omar

Far-left Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar cruised to re-election last week as Democrats retook control of the U.S. House of Representatives. But the celebration may be short-lived as Omar finds herself under a federal criminal investigation over immigration fraud.

Almost from the moment Omar was first elected in 2018, controversy has swirled around the murky details of her entry into the country as a Somali migrant. But speculation turned to concrete action just weeks before Election Day as federal agents raided her Washington, D.C., home. Now, she could face serious consequences for potential immigration violations – and perhaps even deportation.

Authorities are specifically looking into two potential violations Omar may have committed. First, they are investigating the longstanding theory that she entered into a sham marriage with her biological brother to fraudulently secure his entry into the country. They are also examining whether she and her late father lied about her age when she became a U.S. citizen in 2000.

No charges have officially been filed, but as the National Review Editorial Board put it, “If the walls aren’t closing in, the questions are certainly mounting.”

One of those questions stems from Omar’s 2020 memoir, in which she wrote that she was eight years old when civil war broke out in Somalia. The chapter covering that time is titled “War: 1989-1991.”

But if Omar was eight in 1989, that means she was born in 1981 and thus would have been 18 or 19 when her father became a naturalized citizen in 2000. That creates a potentially serious problem. Omar automatically became a citizen when her father did – but that was only possible because she claimed to be 17 at the time. If she was 18 or 19 at the time, she should not have been eligible for automatic citizenship.

Adding to the intrigue, for years, the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library listed Omar’s birth year as 1981 — an entry that remained unchanged through her time in the state House and into her first months in Congress.

In May 2019, however, her staff contacted the library and asked to change the date to 1982 after a video from Omar’s political opponent claiming she was lying about her age began to circle the internet. The library complied with the request, but later admitted it had no documents verifying the new birth year and does not independently check the birth dates it publishes.

Her father’s own story is just as questionable. A 2023 Certificate of Nonexistence of Record from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services shows no file for him under the name she has used or variants of it, including “Nur Omar Mohamed” or “Nur Said Elmi Mohamed.” Agents searching her home this month were looking for the immigration papers her father completed when she was a child.

In other words, it is plausible that a Somali national who is not legitimately a U.S. citizen has been serving in the United States Congress for the past seven years, in clear violation of the Constitution.

The Omar search warrant also includes claims that Omar married her brother. In February 2009, she entered a legal marriage with a man named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen. Both are Muslim, yet the ceremony was performed by a Christian minister in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

According to reporting, few people in the local Somali community knew a wedding had taken place, and it appears that the couple never lived together.

Omar has said the relationship ended in 2011, but the pair did not obtain a legal divorce until December 2017. During those years, she had already reconciled with Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children, filed joint tax returns with him, and had their third child while still legally married to Elmi.

Multiple outlets have reported that Elmi’s school records list the same birth date as the man on her marriage certificate and that Instagram posts showed him referring to Omar’s children as “nieces.”

A private DNA test commissioned in 2021 by Republican operative Anton Lazzaro, using a cigarette butt collected from Omar’s property and a straw from Elmi in England, allegedly returned a 99.9999 percent sibling match from Endeavor DNA Laboratories. Federal investigators have since then obtained their own DNA evidence, which sources familiar with the probe have told the New York Post is critical to proving the sibling allegation.

When asked if she has any familial relation to her ex-husband, Omar responded, “Not to my knowledge.”

Former President Barack Obama called the current investigation “appalling” and accused the Trump administration of raiding Omar’s home, seizing her phone, and chasing a “nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago.” He posted on X that the government was targeting her solely because she criticizes Trump, and Obama repeated her claim that she was 17 when her father naturalized.

However, Obama may have reason to want to avoid anyone looking into the matter. In 2016, while he was still in office, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security investigated the same 2009 marriage and found some evidence it was fraudulent, current and former officials told the New York Times. Prosecutors closed the matter only because the potential felony fell outside the five-year statute of limitations. A Biden-appointed U.S. attorney later shut down a related review in 2021.

Earlier this year, federal agents also seized the phone of Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor. Messages on that phone led a judge to authorize the October search of Omar’s Washington home. Those texts, the DNA evidence, and the missing immigration files for her father are now part of a broader probe into whether the family made false statements when they entered the country as refugees.

Court filings in the case have already referred to the congresswoman as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar.” That is the same surname as the man she married in 2009. Omar has said her name has always been Ilhan Omar and that any other version is wrong.

Omar has also previously described her father as an educator. But reporting reveals he was a colonel in the Somali army under Siad Barre. He trained in the Soviet Union and served until the regime collapsed in 1991. U.S. law bars refugee status for anyone who ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in war crimes and crimes against humanity, which the Somali army engaged in during the country’s civil war.

If prosecutors can show that Omar or her family made materially false statements to obtain citizenship, the government can move to denaturalize her. Denaturalization does not require a criminal conviction, but it does require clear evidence that the citizenship was obtained by fraud.

The claims that Omar married her brother, the birth-year discrepancy, and the questions about her father’s real identity have circulated for years, but finally federal agents are beginning to collect strong enough evidence to build a legitimate case.

It may be that Ilhan Omar’s days in the United States Congress – and perhaps the United States itself – are numbered.