Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Thursday that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) married her brother as part of an immigration scheme, and that a federal investigation into the Minnesota Democrat could end in her deportation.
Mullin made the remarks to podcaster Benny Johnson at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas.
“We know that she married her brother to try to bring him to the United States,” he said, adding of Omar’s ex-husband, “We know he lives now in London.”
Mullin said the inquiry is ongoing and suggested it could widen beyond the marriage itself. “There may be more to this, the whole family migration and possibly some illegal activity for them to come to the United States to begin with,” he told Johnson.
He was also emphatic that any prosecution would rest on evidence rather than politics: “Here’s what I want to make sure we do: if we actually move a case forward, it’s not a political case, it’s an actual case, because they did things wrong.”
On the stakes, he said that if investigators can establish an applicant lied, “There’s no expiration to that. If we can prove it, that you shouldn’t have been here in the first place, we’ll deport you.”
Omar has rejected the accusation for a decade. “Insinuations that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is my brother are absurd and offensive,” she told MPR News in 2016. Her chief of staff, Connor McNutt, called the allegation “a ridiculous lie” earlier this year.
The documented record is narrower than the claim. Omar was naturalized in 2000, at 17. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune and a Hennepin County marriage certificate, she legally married Elmi, a UK citizen, in February 2009, dissolved that marriage in December 2017, and married Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi the following month. Mullin’s assertion concerns an alleged attempt to bring Elmi into the country, not Omar’s own status, which predates the 2009 marriage by nine years.
No official finding has established that Elmi is Omar’s brother. The material aired publicly over the years consists of a since-deleted Instagram photo reported by the Star Tribune in 2019, a since-deleted post on a Somali discussion forum cited by City Journal, and a 2020 Daily Mail interview with a Minneapolis community leader who said Omar introduced Elmi as her brother in the late 2000s.
President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both said publicly they believe Omar committed immigration fraud, a federal offense carrying up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
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