The federal investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar is focused in part on whether she entered into a sham marriage in 2009 to help a man suspected of being her brother obtain a green card, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security investigated the marriage in summer 2016, during the Obama administration, and found some evidence that it was fraudulent, current and former officials said.

Speculation that Omar committed marriage fraud with a brother has shadowed the Minnesota Democrat’s political career for more than a decade and President Donald Trump repeated the accusation last week. She has long called it a right-wing conspiracy theory that federal officials debunked during her first race for elected office in 2016.

But that case stalled chiefly because prosecutors concluded that the potential crime, a felony, fell outside a five-year statute of limitations, according to the current and former officials, most of whose law enforcement careers spanned several presidential administrations.

Now the Trump administration, whose top leaders have long reviled Omar, has revived the scrutiny as one element of a sprawling investigation into the Omar family’s journey to the United States as refugees from war-torn Somalia. At issue is her marriage in 2009, when she was already a U.S. citizen, to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen whom she divorced in 2017.

The reporting for this article is based on interviews with three current and former officials familiar with the present-day investigation and six current and former officials with knowledge of the 2016 investigation.

It is unclear what evidence prosecutors, then or now, have showing that the person Omar married was her brother. Marrying anyone for the sole purpose of securing a green card is illegal under federal law. Marrying a sibling is illegal under state law, but it is not clear whether state authorities ever investigated the matter.

It is also unclear whether federal prosecutors could find a path to charging Omar that skirts the statute of limitations that applies to marriage-based immigration fraud, a crime that would not threaten her citizenship.

Regardless, they could cite the marriage in an indictment or civil action that describes a family immigration fraud conspiracy — a broader case that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said could lead to Omar’s deportation.

The extraordinary investigation burst into public view when agents searched Omar’s Washington home Oct. 12. Democrats have loudly condemned it as a political persecution and said it violates a Justice Department policy to avoid overt measures that could be seen as affecting the vote in the weeks before Election Day. Omar is seeking her fifth term in next week’s midterms.

Up to now, officials have said investigators are examining whether Omar’s late father lied or omitted information in immigration forms before becoming an American citizen. Another subject of inquiry is whether Omar, who was a child when she immigrated to the United States, was too old to have qualified for citizenship through her father in 2000, The New York Times reported last week.

Last week, the Justice Department referred to the congresswoman as Ilhan Nur Said Elmi in a court filing and suggested that the name she has long used is an alias. In a statement Thursday, Trump drew attention to the similarity of the name to that of the man she had married in 2009. He suggested that the two might be siblings.

Omar, an ardent critic of the president, strongly rejected the claim through a spokesperson.

“Rep. Omar has repeatedly and unequivocally denied this baseless, disgusting conspiracy theory,” Jackie Rogers, the spokesperson, said in a statement. “This is a desperate political smear designed to distract from Trump’s failed presidency and two years of Republican failure in Congress.”

Elmi, who is listed on the University of Bristol’s website as a doctoral student writing a thesis about Kenya’s LGBTQ+ community, did not respond to several requests for comment by email, LinkedIn and through a friend.

First Rumblings

Murmurs that Omar married a brother first surfaced publicly in 2016, when she was on the brink of making history as the first Somali American elected to a state legislature. A first-time candidate, she had just defeated a 44-year incumbent in the Democratic primary to represent a Minneapolis district when Somali community message boards and conservative outlets claimed that she had once married a sibling.

Federal agents in Minnesota opened an investigation, according to several people familiar with the matter. They found evidence suggesting that Elmi and Omar were siblings, according to the six former and current officials familiar with the case. But, because prosecutors did not pursue the matter, the agents had limited investigative tools, the officials said.

Elmi had obtained a provisional two-year green card based on the marriage, two former officials said. But when he sought to make that status permanent, immigration officials requested additional evidence about the validity of the marriage. Instead of responding, Elmi left the United States and abandoned his green card petition, the officials said.

The officials who investigated the matter in its early phase included an FBI agent who specializes in public corruption and civil rights cases, and two agents at Homeland Security Investigations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Two of the investigators remain employed at their agencies in Minnesota.

The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to an inquiry.

In August 2016, a local news station reported that the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota had opened an investigation into Omar.

That prompted the campaign to form a “crisis management committee,” Carla Kjellberg, a lawyer who represented Omar, said in a 2018 deposition related to a state campaign finance inquiry. Kjellberg added that the campaign worried that the story, which was being covered by right-wing publications, could gain traction in mainstream outlets.

A means to quash it came Aug. 22, 2016, when the campaign released a letter it had requested from Andrew Luger, then the U.S. attorney in Minnesota. In the three-sentence letter, Luger wrote that “my office is not investigating, nor have we requested an investigation into Ms. Omar.”

Omar at the time characterized the letter as an exoneration that put to rest “flat-out falsehoods.” Kjellberg said in the deposition that the credibility of the claim “fell drastically once Andy Luger said that’s false.”

But in an interview last week, Luger said that the letter “was never meant to say anything about the substance of the claims.” Instead, he said, it was narrowly written to rebut the news station’s report that Luger had asked ICE to investigate Omar, which he called erroneous.

After Luger’s letter became public, local news coverage of the marriage controversy waned. Omar won her first race in a blowout, and she quickly became a rising star on the left.

Trump’s Target

In 2018, two years into the first Trump administration, Omar made history again, becoming the first African refugee and the first hijab-wearing woman elected to Congress.

She and Trump began trading insults soon after she arrived in Washington.

As Trump sought to limit immigration, including from several Muslim countries, Omar became a visible foil, calling her own presence in the U.S. Capitol a “nightmare” for the president.

In summer 2019, Trump told reporters that there was “a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother.”

Those remarks turbocharged interest in Omar’s marital history, which conservative journalists and operatives have spent years scrutinizing.

According to her own accounts, Omar has been married three times. In her 2020 memoir, “This is What America Looks Like,” Omar wrote that she first wed a fellow Somali immigrant, Ahmed Hirsi, in an Islamic ceremony in 2001, when she was 18. The two did not file paperwork to make the union legal at that time, she wrote.

In the book, she described a second marriage in 2009 to a British man as an impulsive elopement during a low point in her life. That was a reference to Elmi, though Omar did not use his name.

In 2014 and 2015, when she was still legally married to Elmi, Omar filed joint federal tax returns with Hirsi, the campaign finance inquiry found.

Omar later said that she amended the tax filings but declined to explain what led to the error. Her marriage to Elmi was dissolved in court in 2017, and Omar said in a divorce filing at that time that they had been separated and had no contact for years.

Omar had said she and Hirsi — the father of her children — reconciled after her relationship with Elmi ended. She and Hirsi got legally married in early 2018 and divorced in late 2019, marriage and court records show. Hirsi did not respond to several messages requesting comment by phone, text and Facebook.

In March 2020, Omar announced her marriage to a third spouse, Tim Mynett, a political consultant her campaign had employed.

Social Service Scandal

Trump returned to the White House last year after promising the biggest deportation push in history. Last fall, he and top aides became engrossed by a social services fraud scandal in Minnesota in which scores of Somali Americans were charged with stealing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Around then, the Justice Department began prioritizing a new inquiry into Omar’s immigration issues, several officials familiar with the inquiry said.

In March, as Trump announced an anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance, the president called Omar “one of the ringleaders.” Days later, Vance told a conservative commentator that the administration had conclusively established that Omar committed immigration fraud and was exploring ways to hold her accountable.

In September, Mullin disclosed that the inquiry had broadened from questions about the 2009 marriage to determine whether the lawmaker and her relatives committed fraud after they were admitted to the country as refugees.

“If we can prove that you shouldn’t have been here in the first place,” he said, “we’ll deport you.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Ernesto Londoño/Tierney L. Cross
c. 2026 The New York Times Company