Federal officials announced this week that nearly half of all immigrants in the greater Minneapolis area were found to have committed some form of immigration fraud.
The findings came during a September enforcement sweep and included cases involving sham marriages, falsified death certificates, and other schemes, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edley.
In 2008, the State Department temporarily suspended a family reunification program used by Somali immigrants after DNA testing revealed that about 80 percent of claimed family relationships were not valid.
Officials have cited the episode as an example of persistent concerns over immigration fraud within the community.
“And when it comes to “bizarre schemes,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) serves as Exhibit A,” Johnson noted.
Omar (D-Minn.) has faced longstanding allegations that she married her brother in order to help him obtain legal status in the United States, accusations she has not directly addressed, Johnson added.
In 2016, while Omar was running for the Minnesota state legislature, questions surfaced on a local Somali discussion board suggesting that she had a religious, but not legal, marriage with Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children.
Public records, however, showed that in 2009 she had legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, whom several members of the Somali community identified online as her brother. Omar remained legally married to Elmi during her 2016 campaign, though her campaign website listed Hirsi as her husband and made no mention of Elmi.
Johnson continued:
It appeared that Omar had married her brother for some fraudulent purpose.
As if to put an exclamation point on the scam, the Omar-Elmi marriage license was executed by Wilecia Harris, a Christian minister, despite the couple’s Muslim faith.
When I asked the Omar campaign about her marriages, a criminal defense attorney responded with a message accusing me of bigotry — and failing to respond to my questions.
This has been Omar’s modus operandi ever since.
To this day, the reason for her marriage to Elmi — from whom, she says, she separated in 2011, but which didn’t officially end until 2017 — remains unclear.
One Somali source told the Daily Mail that Omar claimed she was trying to help her brother get US student loans.
Other Somalis in Minneapolis told me that Elmi had been living an openly gay lifestyle in London, as amply depicted in then-public social media posts.
The marriage, they believed, was a family ploy to remove him from his life in London (to which he later returned).
In 2018, Omar was elected to Congress. Midway through her first term, documents from a state campaign finance investigation revealed that she had filed joint tax returns with Ahmed Hirsi while she was still legally married to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. Internal campaign records also showed aides debating how to address questions about her marital history.
Campaign consultant Ben Goldfarb privately noted that the situation was difficult to explain without making it more confusing.
Omar has consistently denied that Elmi is her brother, calling the allegations “baseless.” However, investigators who have reviewed available records have said they found no evidence supporting her denials, pointing instead to public documents, photographs, and social media posts that indicate a sibling relationship.
When the Minneapolis Star Tribune assigned two reporters to investigate the matter in 2019, they requested interviews with Omar and her family members. She declined, Johnson noted.
Immigration violations are only part of the legal issues involving members of Minnesota’s Somali community. Several local Somali residents were implicated in the Feeding Our Future case, the largest COVID-19 fraud uncovered in the United States, with losses to taxpayers exceeding $250 million, he wrote.
Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who has overseen the two Feeding Our Future trials to date, has also described broader Medicaid fraud schemes involving Somali defendants. Thompson has estimated that those cases could ultimately amount to billions of dollars in losses.
