Putting this lie to rest.
Did U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar Marry Her Brother?
We found no public records or credible sources contradicting Omar’s account of her past, nor any substantive evidence corroborating claims that Elmi is her brother or that their marriage was otherwise fraudulent. In addition, some of the claims offered in support of the rumor don’t seem to add up.
According to Omar’s proffered version of events, she
fled the Somalian civil war with her family in 1991 and lived for four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before immigrating to the U.S. in 1995.
Omar’s mother died when she was 2, so she and her siblings were raised by her father and grandfather. The Minneapolis
Star Tribune reported just before the 2018 midterm elections that:
During an interview, Omar showed a reporter cellphone photos of documents from her family’s U.S. entry in 1995 after fleeing Somalia’s civil war. She declined to provide copies of the papers, which included refugee resettlement approval forms and identification cards, but they appeared to list her father, siblings and Omar by order of birth, with Omar as the youngest of seven children.
No one named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who is three years younger than Omar, could be seen listed in the documents.
“For someone like me, who left a war-torn country at the age of 8, who got refugee status to come to America, where in the world am I finding a sibling 15 years, 20 years later to seek to do what people accuse me of?” Omar said.
Also, if Ahmed Elmi were truly Omar’s brother, why would he have needed to take the drastic step of marrying her in order to secure a path to U.S. citizenship?
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) policies qualify immigrants as eligible to apply for permanent residency status (and later become naturalized citizens) if they are the “spouse of a U.S. citizen” or the “brother or sister of a U.S. citizen.” Why would Omar commit a federal crime and risk a prison sentence (and possibly her own citizenship status) in order to provide her brother with the opportunity to apply for something he would already have been eligible to seek?