Obama-Era FBI and DHS Found Evidence Suggesting Ilhan Omar’s 2009 Marriage Was Fraudulent, Report Says

Federal investigators under the Obama administration found some evidence in 2016 that Rep. Ilhan Omar’s 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen long alleged to be her brother, was entered into to help him obtain a green card, according to current and former officials cited in a New York Times report published Thursday. The case stalled primarily because prosecutors determined the potential felony fell outside the five-year statute of limitations.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security examined the marriage during the summer of 2016, as Omar campaigned for the Minnesota House. Officials told the Times that agents developed evidence suggesting Omar and Elmi were siblings. Among those involved were an FBI agent focused on public corruption and civil rights cases and two agents from Homeland Security Investigations. Two of the investigators remain employed in Minnesota.

Omar, already a U.S. citizen at the time, married Elmi in 2009. The couple divorced in 2017. Two former officials said Elmi received a provisional two-year green card based on the marriage. When he later sought to convert it to permanent status, immigration authorities requested additional evidence about the marriage’s validity. Elmi left the United States and abandoned the petition instead of responding, the officials said. Marrying solely to secure a green card is a federal felony; marrying a sibling is illegal under state law.

The Times account challenges Omar’s longstanding characterization of earlier inquiries as having fully debunked the allegations. In 2016, then-U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger wrote a letter to Omar’s attorney stating that his office was not investigating her immigration status and had not requested such an investigation, responding to a Fox 9 report. Omar’s campaign presented the letter as resolving “flat-out falsehoods.” Luger later said the letter addressed only whether his office had requested an ICE probe and was not intended as a statement on the substance of the claims; federal agents may have continued examining the matter independently.

A source familiar with the matter told Fox News that a Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney in Minnesota later shut down the probe in 2021. The current Trump administration has revived scrutiny of the marriage as one element of a broader criminal investigation into the Omar family’s path from Somalia as refugees. Federal agents searched Omar’s Washington, D.C., home on October 12 under a judicially authorized warrant, seizing electronic devices, documents, and her passport. Investigators are also examining whether Omar’s late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, submitted false or incomplete information on immigration forms and whether Omar was too old in 2000 to derive citizenship automatically through him as a minor.

Omar has repeatedly denied that Elmi is her brother or that the marriage was for immigration benefits. In a 2016 statement she called the insinuations “absurd and offensive.” In her first television interview after the October 12 search, she told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes the claims were “insane” and originated on a Somali blog before being amplified by others. When asked if there was any “weird kernel of truth” or if she was related to Elmi in any way, she replied, “Not to my knowledge.” A spokesperson said she has “repeatedly and unequivocally denied this baseless, disgusting conspiracy theory.”

Former President Barack Obama, whose administration oversaw the 2016 inquiry, issued a lengthy statement on October 18 criticizing the current investigation as political targeting of an elected official for her views. He described Omar as having arrived in the United States at age 12 and becoming a citizen automatically at 17 when her father naturalized, and he called the probe an attempt to uncover a “nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago.” The Times report indicates federal agents during his presidency found evidence raising questions about the later marriage.

Omar, a Somali-born refugee who resettled in the United States in the 1990s, became a citizen in 2000. She has not been charged with any crime. The five-year statute of limitations on marriage fraud means that offense itself is unlikely to support charges against her, though the broader inquiry into family immigration paperwork remains active. No public DNA results or definitive proof of a sibling relationship have been disclosed.