Buried in a report aimed at discrediting ongoing probes into Rep. Ilhan Omar, The Washington Post divulged fresh evidence suggesting her previous marriage to her alleged brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was a sham.
In recounting the first Trump administration’s ultimately inconclusive investigation into some of the same issues federal officials are examining anew concerning the congresswoman’s background, the Post reveals that Elmi once filed a petition to have his residency status, derived from his marriage-based green card, shifted from conditional to permanent. According to the newspaper, U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) “requested additional evidence due to concerns over the validity of his marriage,” at which point Elmi pulled his application.
This immediately raises three questions: What was it in that application that gave immigration officials pause? Why was it that Elmi dropped his bid to obtain permanent residency if the marriage was legitimate? And did authorities in the first Trump administration vigorously pursue these issues, and are they vigorously pursuing them now to the extent there are potential legal issues arising therefrom not bound by statutes of limitation?
While the Post mentions this matter in passing, there is critical additional context here that the newspaper omitted, which ties Elmi’s abandonment of his permanent residency push to Omar.
Elmi almost certainly filed and then withdrew an I-751 petition. Under federal law, typically, within the 90-day period before “the second anniversary of the date on which an alien obtained” a green card, such aliens must file an I-751 to remove conditions on their residency. Absent circumstances like death or divorce, petitioners must file jointly with their spouses.
Elmi and Omar did not legally divorce until 2017, years after he had left the U.S. and returned to his native United Kingdom. The alleged siblings were married here in 2009. Even if it took an exceptionally long period of time for Elmi to receive his marriage-based green card, that period plus two years almost assuredly would have fallen long before 2017. So presumably, they would have filed their petition jointly.
Per the current instructions for filing an I-751, petitioners must show evidence that their marriage “was entered in ‘good faith’ and was not for the purpose of circumventing immigration laws.” To do so, they must provide a number of supporting documents, like the birth certificates of children, contracts demonstrating joint occupancy/residency, “financial records showing joint ownership of assets and joint responsibility for liabilities,” and “other documents” and sworn affidavits demonstrating one’s marriage is legitimate.
When filing jointly, one’s spouse needs to sign, affirming, under penalty of perjury, that the petition and all supporting documents are “complete, true, and correct.”
Enter Ilhan Omar, and key facts that The Washington Post and others appear to have missed. As I documented in my 2020 book, American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party, during the 2018-19 period, then-State Rep. Ilhan Omar faced an ethics probe resulting in a finding that she had improperly spent $3,400 in campaign funds.
Part of that improper spending centered on legal fees, including to immigration lawyers. Omar hired those attorneys to help her with “crisis management” beginning in August 2016, when, following her historic primarying of a 44-year Democrat-Farm-Labor incumbent in Minnesota House District 60B, word first began swirling that Elmi was Omar’s brother, and her marriage to him constituted a marriage/immigration fraud scandal.
In researching my book, I obtained the complete docket pertaining to the ethics probe from Minnesota authorities.
Records produced in that probe indicate Omar’s lawyers submitted FOIA requests to USCIS for documents from immigration authorities in connection with rumors that officials had issued her a summons or were investigating her — which her counsel thought would be unlikely “unless someone submitted very concrete evidence of fraud to them … proving her legal husband was a biological brother or something like that.”
What documents did Omar’s team seek out? Well, according to timesheets produced in the probe, they were looking at an I-130 — a petition for an alien relative to obtain a green card — and an I-751. Presumably, Omar would have filed the former document to help Elmi obtain a green card, and the latter again to shift his residency status post-marriage from conditional to permanent.
Months later, in March 2017, Omar’s attorneys received the FOIA response. We do not know what records USCIS produced. In a November 2018 deposition, one of Omar’s attorneys indicated that her team was seeking her “immigration file,” in part to see “if there was any statement of support or anything with regard to her legal husband,” Elmi. The lawyer added, “We needed to know whether there was any — is there something in this immigration file that would hurt Ilhan and the campaign?”
In a December 2018 deposition, Omar cryptically indicated that whatever documents her lawyers had received in response to the FOIA, she herself “would also have [had them].”
“I have much more than what … [her lawyer] would have gotten from them [immigration authorities].”
“My father’s still alive, so I have an old man’s storage of documents,” Omar said then.
Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, also sometimes referred to as Nur Said, has since passed. Whether he made any misrepresentations or omissions in documentation used to enable himself, Ilhan, and several of her siblings to come to the U.S. from Kenya as refugees is now reportedly something authorities are reviewing. While presented as an educator by Omar in public writings, her father was reportedly a senior military officer under the tyrannical Siad Barre regime, which had a Marxist-Islamist orientation and engaged in numerous atrocities.
In the raid of her current D.C. home, federal agents are said to have seized Omar’s cellphone, notebooks, computers, and passport. It is possible they also secured documents of the kind Omar suggested her father held years prior.
The then-state representative in her deposition, said regarding the FOIA’d documents that she “can’t even remember if [her immigration attorney] actually produced anything, but he might have just been, like, we looked at it and she [Omar] has nothing to worry about. You guys are going to be fine. Ilhan isn’t being deported.”
Reports suggest that at least one leg of the current federal investigation may end in an attempt to denaturalize and deport Omar over immigration-related offenses. Those offenses do not appear to include the alleged sham marriage to her husband. The associated offenses may be beyond relevant statutes of limitation.
There has long been evidence raised by the likes of conservative journalists including David Steinberg, Powerline’s Scott Johnson, and Preya Samsundar calling into question the legitimacy of Omar’s marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
This includes Elmi’s flamboyance; the fact that he and Omar are both apparently Muslims yet were married by a Christian minister; a raft of since-deleted social media posts suggesting they are siblings and that Omar has lied including under penalty of perjury about their contacts; residence records indicating Omar was living with supposed ex-husband Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her then-two children and Elmi (with whom she had no children and whom she divorced Islamically just two years after her civil marriage and a year before reuniting with Hirsi and having another child with him) at the same time, and as Omar and Elmi were both pursuing their education at North Dakota State University; and Omar’s evasiveness and unwillingness to present documentary evidence of the authenticity of her marriage to Elmi.
The Post’s new revelation regarding Elmi’s petition to remove conditions on his residency adds a compelling new piece of evidence to this potential scandal.
Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.