Trump administration border czar Tom Homan said that the Department of Homeland Security is reviewing allegations that Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar may have committed immigration fraud by entering into a marriage with a relative.
President Donald Trump and several of his allies have long asserted that Omar’s first husband, Ahmed Elmi, is her brother and that the marriage, which began in 2009 and ended in divorce in 2017, was arranged to facilitate immigration benefits.
No DNA evidence or official documentation has substantiated those claims, and Omar has consistently denied them.
In an interview with Newsmax, Homan said he is examining whether Omar violated immigration laws and whether her legal status could be affected. Omar’s congressional biography states that she arrived in the United States with her family in the 1990s after fleeing civil war in Somalia.
“We’re pulling the records, we’re pulling the files,” Homan said Monday. “We’re looking at it … I’m running that down this week.”
Homan stated that the DHS is conducting a thorough review of visa fraud within the Somali community in Minnesota, following the department’s claim that 50% of visas issued in Minnesota may be fraudulent.
“President Trump has instructed us to go down, and we’re going to deep dive all of this, and we’re going to hold people accountable,” he noted.
Trump accused the Somali-born congresswoman of marrying her brother to commit immigration fraud during an interview with Politico.
Omar has previously called the allegations “baseless and absurd,” dismissing them as Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
But a 2019 Minneapolis Star-Tribune investigation found discrepancies in Omar’s marital and immigration records that she has never fully explained.
According to public records and Daily Mail reporting, Omar married Elmi in a civil ceremony in 2009 while still religiously married to her first husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi. She claimed to have separated from Elmi in 2011, yet did not file for divorce until 2017.
During that time, she and Hirsi had a third child together. Omar later divorced Hirsi again in 2019 after reports surfaced of her affair with political consultant Tim Mynett, whom she later married.
In February 2020, the Daily Mail published explosive testimony from Abdihakim Osman, a Somali community leader in Minneapolis, who said Omar openly told friends that Elmi was her brother and that she “needed to get papers for him to stay in the United States.”
Omar is also under fire this week after she filed an updated financial filing to answer questions about her previously reported income.
However, Republicans are not happy with it, and House Minority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., says the changes only make things worse.
“Ilhan Omar is even more clueless than I thought if she thinks this financial disclosure revision clears her of suspicion,” Emmer exclusively told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
“She can backtrack, obfuscate, and distract all she wants but she’s made clear who she is: A fraud-enabling, racist antisemite who espouses anti-American rhetoric every chance she gets,” Emmer charged of his fellow Minnesota lawmaker.
Emmer went on to claim Omar is “entirely unfit to be a member of Congress” if it’s true she was “involved in fraud or improper financial gain in any capacity.”
“She should be held accountable to the fullest extent,” Emmer said. “My colleagues on the House Ethics Committee have my full backing for any and all investigations into Ilhan and her potential misdealings.”
An amended filing reviewed by The Wall Street Journal shows Omar and her husband’s assets were between $18,004 and $95,000, a sharp drop from an earlier disclosure that estimated their holdings between $6 million and $30 million.
“The amended disclosure confirms what we’ve said all along: The congresswoman is not a millionaire,” Omar spokesperson Jacklyn Rogers told the Journal, adding that the filing was corrected “as soon as the discrepancy was identified.”
The Journal says that the revised filing shows that Omar made between $102,503 and $1,005,200 in 2024 from assets she and her husband own. The attorney’s letter included proof that her husband had received $213,200 in payments from his venture capital management firm and $3,000 from a winery.
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