The Murky Ilhan Omar Affair

National Review Online

Monday, November 02, 2026

 

If the walls aren’t closing in, the questions are certainly mounting about the Ilhan Omar case.

 

In the wake of the recent federal raid on the progressive congresswoman’s Washington, D.C., home, there’s been more reporting on her dubious marriage to a man who might be her brother and the murky circumstances of her arrival here in the United States.

 

We have been critics of the Trump administration’s targeting of its political enemies, and there’s no doubt that if Omar had an “R” following her name, the feds wouldn’t be doggedly pursuing her. But there’s much we still don’t know about the investigation, while what’s in the public record casts significant doubt on her immigration status. The New York Times reported the other day that federal agents during the Obama administration found evidence that she had married her brother.

 

There have long been doubts about Omar’s marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, and our friends at the Power Line blog have done much over the years to advance this story. Before she legally married Elmi, she had been Islamically married to a man named Ahmed Hirsi, before separating and marrying Elmi. Rumors began in the Somali community in Minneapolis that she had married him because the family disapproved of his allegedly gay lifestyle while he was in the U.K. and wanted to get him to the U.S., while others said that the arrangement was meant to secure legal status for him here.

 

Omar has shed no light on any of this, saying only that she had an impulsive elopement with Elmi. She had already had children with Hirsi by this time, and curiously, legal filings suggest that Omar, Elmi, and Hirsi all used the same address. She also filed joint taxes with Hirsi while married to Elmi. Regarding the rumors in the Somali community about Elmi’s lifestyle, his social media profile is consistent with them, and his subsequent academic career has been focused on LGBTQ rights in African countries.

 

Another oddity is that the Omar-Elmi marriage certificate was signed by a Christian minister, a grave offense against sharia law (the suggestion is that any local imam may have known the real score and not wanted to have anything to do with it).

 

After eight years of marriage to Elmi — who returned to the U.K. as U.S. immigration authorities were inquiring about the status of the marriage — Omar divorced him and legally married Hirsi, with whom she had had another child while still technically married to Elmi. (She ended up divorcing Hirsi and marrying a political consultant who worked on her campaign.)

 

Even if Omar did indeed marry her brother, the statute of limitations long expired on any fraud related to the sham; one reason federal investigators stood down in the Obama years is that this presented an insuperable obstacle to a prosecution.

 

The real significance of the alleged marriage to the brother would be the implication that Omar’s true name is Elmi; a recent DOJ filing referred to her as “Congresswoman Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar.”

 

One theory about her family history has been that they were Elmis, but her father and Ilhan took on the name Omar to get into the United States. This would mean the basis of their status in the United States was a falsehood. In addition, there are questions about whether her father was honest about his apparent military background serving the rapacious Barre dictatorship in Somalia when seeking asylum here (Omar refers to him only as an “educator”); whether he ever naturalized at all (if he didn’t, it would mean that Omar never naturalized); and whether Omar was really under age 18 when she automatically naturalized at the time her father supposedly naturalized.

 

There is much still to learn, and we are skeptical that there are going to be readily prosecutable offenses here that aren’t time-barred. As for a denaturalization proceeding, it would presumably be contentious and drawn out. But everyone should want to know the truth of this matter. It may be that Ilhan Omar doesn’t belong here, not just as a matter of her sheer ingratitude to the country that welcomed her from a Kenyan refugee camp but on the facts and legal merits as well.