Trump administration border adviser Tom Homan said this week that the Department of Homeland Security is reviewing allegations that Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar may have committed immigration fraud by entering into a marriage with a relative.
President Donald Trump and several of his allies have long asserted that Omar’s first husband, Ahmed Elmi, is her brother and that the marriage, which began in 2009 and ended in divorce in 2017, was arranged to facilitate immigration benefits.
No DNA evidence or official documentation has substantiated those claims, and Omar has consistently denied them.
In an interview with Newsmax, Homan said he is examining whether Omar violated immigration laws and whether her legal status could be affected. Omar’s congressional biography states that she arrived in the United States with her family in the 1990s after fleeing civil war in Somalia.
“We’re pulling the records, we’re pulling the files,” Homan said Monday. “We’re looking at it … I’m running that down this week.”
Homan stated that the DHS is conducting a thorough review of visa fraud within the Somali community in Minnesota, following the department’s claim that 50% of visas issued in Minnesota may be fraudulent.
“President Trump has instructed us to go down, and we’re going to deep dive all of this, and we’re going to hold people accountable,” he noted.
Trump accused the Somali-born congresswoman of marrying her brother to commit immigration fraud during a new interview with Politico released Tuesday.
“I don’t want to see a woman that, you know, marries her brother to get in and then becomes a congressman, does nothing but complain,” Trump said in the interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns, referring to Omar’s alleged 2009 marriage to Ahmed Elmi, who multiple reports and witnesses have claimed is her biological brother.
Trump made the remarks after Omar condemned recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Minneapolis targeting illegal Somali nationals—a crackdown that followed revelations of a $1 billion welfare fraud scheme in Minnesota, portions of which federal investigators say were funneled to the Somali terror group al-Shabaab.
“All she does is complain, complain, complain, and yet her country is a mess,” Trump continued. “Let her go back, fix up her own country. So no, Somalia—and I was right about it.”
The president also accused Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of failing to address the crisis: “They have an incompetent governor there, too.”
Omar has previously called the allegations “baseless and absurd,” dismissing them as Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
But a 2019 Minneapolis Star-Tribune investigation found discrepancies in Omar’s marital and immigration records that she has never fully explained.
According to public records and Daily Mail reporting, Omar married Elmi in a civil ceremony in 2009 while still religiously married to her first husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi. She claimed to have separated from Elmi in 2011, yet did not file for divorce until 2017.
During that time, she and Hirsi had a third child together. Omar later divorced Hirsi again in 2019 after reports surfaced of her affair with political consultant Tim Mynett, whom she later married.
In February 2020, the Daily Mail published explosive testimony from Abdihakim Osman, a Somali community leader in Minneapolis, who said Omar openly told friends that Elmi was her brother and that she “needed to get papers for him to stay in the United States.”
Osman told the outlet, “No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the certificate years later.”
Osman described Elmi as “very feminine in the way he dressed,” saying the Somali community was shocked to learn he had married Omar. “When Ilhan married Elmi, no one even knew about it,” Osman said. “She kept it quiet because an imam would have refused to marry them if he knew they were related.”
