This week, PJ Media editor and investigative journalist David Steinberg published another in his series of bombshell reports on the twists and turns in the family life of Ilhan Omar, a candidate for the open Fifth Congressional District seat in Minnesota.
The seat has been occupied since 2007 by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN-05), now a candidate for Minnesota attorney general. The district includes all of Minneapolis, the city with the largest population of Somali immigrants in North America.
Believed to be a shoe-in, Omar, once a Somali refugee herself, has never fully explained the circumstances surrounding allegations that she was married to her brother.
According to Steinberg:
Immediately after being elected to her current seat in 2016, Omar faced allegations — soon backed by a remarkable amount of evidence — that she had married her own brother in 2009, and was still legally his wife. They officially divorced in December 2017.
The motivation for the marriage remains unclear. However, the totality of the evidence points to possible immigration fraud and student loan fraud.
Rep. Omar has stated that she did marry “British citizen” Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, though the allegation that he is her brother is “absurd and offensive.”
…exclusive new evidence — from official archived high school records and corroborating sources — strongly supports the claim that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is indeed her brother.
Reporters and commentators have speculated that the marriage involved immigration fraud and have urged the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate the matter.
The timing of Omar’s 2009 marriage to Elmi nearly coincides with the 2007-2008 scandal surrounding the Somalian community in which the FBI revealed that many young Somali men were leaving the U.S. to fight for the terrorist organization al-Shabaab.
While this was happening, an additional scandal rocked the Somalian community in Minnesota in 2008 when the U.S. Department of State (DOS) discovered widespread fraud in one of its largest programs for admissions to America, the so-called P-3 family reunification program.
First revealed by Miriam Jordan writing at The Wall Street Journal, the DOS learned that as many as 30,000 Somalis had entered America under the false pretense of “family members,” but were later determined through random DNA testing to have used the program fraudulently.
Large numbers of Somali refugee family members were found to not be biologically related at all. Under the scandal, Somali “relatives” were continuously being “found” and joining their “family” in the U.S. As Frontline reported in 2015, they were making up “ghost children.”
The degree of the fraud shocked the outgoing Bush Administration and as President Barack Obama took charge of the DOS, it had no choice but to suspend the program indefinitely. From 2008-2012, family reunification from Somalia, and other east African countries, was closed.
However, no effort was made by the Obama administration’s immigration officials to discover and remove those found to have committed immigration fraud. There is no evidence to date that Omar’s family participated in the widespread practice.
Indeed, when allegations surfaced in 2016 about Omar’s questionable marriage, then Minnesota U.S. Attorney Andrew Lugar, an Obama appointee, refused to investigate, and corrected local affiliate KMSP Fox 9 for reporting that he did.
“U.S. Attorney Andy Luger says he did not ask U.S. Immigration & Customs (ICE) to investigate the immigration status of legislative candidate Ilhan Omar,” Fox 9 reported.
But now, under a new Republican administration, the DOJ and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have reopened investigations into fraudulent immigration, which, if the allegations against her are true, Omar could be tied up in.
In Nov. 2017, for instance, the DOJ revoked the citizenship of four Somalians living in Minnesota who had lied on their visa applications.
“The current immigration system is easily abused by fraudsters and nefarious actors, and that’s certainly true of the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program,” Sessions said at the time. “If the fraud is not detected and swift enforcement actions are not taken, chain migration only multiplies the consequences of this abuse.”
