By Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says the federal government is actively investigating Rep. Ilhan Omar’s immigration history, including the long-running allegation that the Minnesota Democrat married her brother to help him obtain immigration benefits.
Mullin made the remarks during an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, telling Johnson that the matter is an “ongoing investigation.” DHS separately confirmed Friday that it would not discuss the specifics of an active investigation, saying only that “No one, including members of Congress, are above the law.”
“We know that she married her brother to try to bring him to the United States,” Mullin said. “We know he lives now in London.”
The allegation centers on Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen whom Omar legally married in Minnesota in 2009. Omar has consistently denied that Elmi is her brother, and no court or federal agency has publicly established that the two are siblings.
Mullin suggested investigators are examining more than 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.
That distinction could prove important. Omar came to the United States with her family as a refugee in the 1990s and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000—nine years before her marriage to Elmi.
Mullin said federal officials would have to establish actual immigration violations before taking action.
“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,” he said. “If you lied about certain things about your application. 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’s citizenship makes that process considerably more complicated than ordinary deportation. Federal law allows the government to seek denaturalization when citizenship was illegally obtained or procured through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation. The Justice Department has aggressively increased such cases this year, announcing in August that it had filed 25 denaturalization complaints in roughly two weeks.
But the allegation involving Elmi concerns a marriage that occurred after Omar had already become an American citizen. Proof of marriage fraud in 2009, standing alone, would therefore not establish that her 2000 naturalization was fraudulent. For Omar to lose her citizenship on the grounds Mullin described, federal authorities would generally need evidence that she was not legally entitled to citizenship in the first place or that material information was concealed or misrepresented during the process that led to her naturalization.
A Marriage That Has Drawn Questions for Years
Questions about Omar’s relationship with Elmi first became a major political issue during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota Legislature.
Omar has repeatedly rejected the central allegation.
“Insinuations that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is my brother are absurd and offensive,” Omar said in 2016.
Public records examined by the Minnesota Star Tribune show that Omar legally married Elmi in 2009. She has said the two separated in 2011, although their legal divorce was not completed until 2017. Omar then legally married Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, the father of her three children, in January 2018.
The Star Tribune’s reporting also uncovered another unusual element in the timeline: Omar and Hirsi filed joint federal tax returns in 2014 and 2015 even though Omar remained legally married to Elmi. Omar later corrected the tax filings. The newspaper reported that the discrepancy revived questions about the nature of the Elmi marriage but did not establish that Elmi was Omar’s brother.
Omar has generally declined to provide detailed public answers about Elmi beyond denying that he is a relative. The Star Tribune reported in 2019 that it tried to authenticate claims using public records and social-media posts but noted the difficulty of establishing family relationships involving refugees from war-torn Somalia, where government documentation can be limited.
The allegation gained new attention in 2020 when Minneapolis Somali community figure Abdihakim Osman told The Daily Mail that Omar had introduced Elmi as her brother from London and discussed helping him obtain “papers.”
“No one knew there had been a wedding [to Elmi] until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later,” Osman said.
Omar has continued to deny the allegation. Her chief of staff, Connor McNutt, dismissed renewed claims earlier this year, saying: “This is a ridiculous lie and desperate attempt to distract from the pedophile protection party’s unpopular war of choice, increasing gas prices, and rapidly dropping polling numbers.”
Trump and Vance Have Also Raised the Allegation
Mullin is not the first senior Trump administration official to accuse Omar of immigration fraud.
Vice President JD Vance said in March: “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America.”
President Donald Trump has likewise said he believes Omar “married her brother, which is totally illegal.”
The accusations are substantially stronger than Trump’s comments during his first administration. In 2019, when reporters asked about the same allegation, Trump said he did not know whether it was true and expected authorities to look into it. The Star Tribune at the time described the claim as unproven.
Marriage fraud is a federal crime and can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. But no criminal charges related to Omar’s marriage to Elmi have been publicly announced, and Mullin did not disclose what evidence investigators have uncovered.
For now, the most significant development is that the controversy has moved beyond years of political accusations: the sitting Homeland Security secretary says the federal government is investigating it.
Whether investigators can prove any of those allegations—and whether anything they find could legally affect the Squad member’s citizenship—remains an open question.
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