A federal investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar's immigration history is zeroing in on how she and her father obtained U.S. citizenship, not the long-running allegation that she married her own brother, because the marriage-fraud statute of limitations expired years ago.
Immigration officials and former federal law enforcement figures told the New York Post that the Trump administration's best legal path runs through the paperwork Omar's late father filed when the family sought naturalization in 2000, not through the Minnesota congresswoman's 2009 marriage to Ahmed Elmi, a British national long rumored to be her sibling. Marriage fraud carries a five-year statute of limitations, and Omar divorced Elmi in 2017, putting any criminal charge on that front well out of reach.
The distinction matters. If investigators can show that Omar or her father, Nur Said Mohamed Elmi, lied on the immigration applications that made the family U.S. citizens, the Trump administration could launch a denaturalization process, stripping Omar of her citizenship altogether and opening the door to deportation.
A top immigration official laid out the legal stakes plainly:
"If there's enough evidence that she or [her father] lied on her immigration application to become a United States citizen, whether it was one time or several times, the Trump administration could initiate a denaturalization process that would strip her of her citizenship."
A second former top immigration official agreed. "If she misrepresented herself, that would wipe her out from naturalization," the official said. Unlike marriage fraud, citizenship fraud has no statute of limitations. That makes the family's 2000 naturalization paperwork the investigation's center of gravity.
Omar's father, a former Somali National Army colonel who trained in the Soviet Union and led a regiment during the 1977, 78 Ogaden War against Ethiopia, fled Somalia after the 1991 civil war and arrived in the United States in 1995. He became a naturalized citizen in 2000, and Omar, then a minor, received citizenship through his application. He died in 2020. Somali-language reports and a tweet from a former Somali prime minister identified him at the time of his death as a colonel, a military background that had not been widely known.
Sources described the elder Elmi's paperwork as "littered with traps", potential misrepresentations that investigators could use to challenge the family's entire naturalization chain. One legal wrinkle: a pre-1983 law required both parents to be naturalized U.S. citizens for their children to receive citizenship through them, unless one parent was deceased. Omar has said her mother, Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein, died when Omar was two years old. Whether documentation supports that claim remains an open question.
The investigation also touches on Omar's disputed age, a detail that could determine whether she qualified for citizenship as a minor child under 18. Congressional records list her birth date as October 1982. But former Minnesota congressional candidate AJ Kern pointed to archived versions of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library's website showing Omar's birth year had originally appeared as 1981 before being revised to 1982.
The revision reportedly came two days after a 2019 social media video went viral arguing Omar was 18 or 19 in 2000, not 17. If Omar was 18 at the time of her father's naturalization, she would not have automatically received citizenship as a minor child, and her entire legal status could rest on paperwork she filed independently.
Omar has never publicly produced a birth certificate. She has said the original was destroyed during Somalia's civil unrest. The identities of five of her six siblings remain, as the Post reported, "entirely unknown."
The probe extends well beyond one agency. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on a podcast that investigators are examining "the broader family migration history regarding Omar" and that "something's going to happen." ICE, meanwhile, has refused to release records related to an immigration fraud investigation into Omar, citing a federal law enforcement exemption that applies only when proceedings are active or contemplated. The agency invoked FOIA exemption 7(A), which requires a "reasonable likelihood" of a pending enforcement action, a legal threshold that itself signals an open case.
Vice President JD Vance confirmed the Department of Justice is actively reviewing the allegations.
"I don't want to prejudge an investigation. It certainly seems like something fishy is there. If we think that there's a crime, we're going to prosecute that crime."
Border czar Tom Homan confirmed separately in December 2025 that DHS was investigating whether Omar committed immigration fraud by allegedly marrying her brother. And the scrutiny did not begin with the current administration. The New York Times reported that the Biden-era Justice Department opened a formal investigation into Omar's finances, campaign spending, and interactions with a foreign citizen in 2024, a fact that undercuts Omar's claim that the probe is nothing more than a partisan vendetta.
Financial disclosures have added another layer of scrutiny. Omar and her husband Tim Mynett's reported net worth skyrocketed by at least 3,500 percent in a single year, reaching between $6 million and $30 million by the end of 2024, according to the Washington Free Beacon. Omar later filed amended disclosure forms that showed her net worth dropping dramatically, to between $18,004 and $95,000, a swing so large it drew formal attention from House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who requested business records from Mynett's company and announced plans to subpoena Mynett.
Omar has dismissed the investigations in blunt terms. Confronted on camera about Vance's claims, she called them baseless. "That is not something that is happening. That man is delusional," she told Fox News. She added: "They're just saying stupid s***." No detailed, on-the-record rebuttal of the specific citizenship or financial allegations has followed.
The man at the center of the brother allegation has stayed quiet. Ahmed Elmi, whom Omar married on February 12, 2009, in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, in a ceremony performed by a Christian minister, surfaced last November as a visiting scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. By January he had returned to the United Kingdom and taken a position at the University of Bristol's School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, where he leads undergraduate seminars on political theory. He is conducting PhD research into "queerphobia in Kenya," funded by British taxpayers, and launched a Substack blog on the topic in the spring.
Documents reviewed by the Post show that Omar, Elmi, and Ahmed Hirsi, Omar's first husband by a non-legally binding Muslim ceremony in 2002 and the father of her first three children, shared a residence at one point during the period Omar was legally married to Elmi. Local bloggers in Minnesota's Somali community had alleged that Omar introduced Elmi as her brother from London who needed "papers."
A former executive-level federal official said a DNA test would settle the sibling question definitively, but acknowledged the limits.
"A DNA test would absolutely resolve the question one way or another. But there's no legal obligation for [Elmi] to cooperate from another country."
The same official predicted how any request would play out: "The request will be made for DNA testing and it will be refused loudly and publicly." Omar, the official added, "will pout and scream and say it's offensive and a witch hunt."
Neither Omar nor Elmi responded to the Post's requests for comment.
Omar's marital history alone is tangled enough to keep investigators busy. She wed Hirsi in an Islamic ceremony in 2002, a union the state of Minnesota did not recognize. They had two children, Isra in 2003 and Adnan in 2005. She then legally married Elmi in 2009, had a third child with Hirsi while still married to Elmi, divorced Elmi in 2017, legally married Hirsi, divorced Hirsi, and married Mynett, a former campaign staffer. Mynett is her fourth husband. He is a U.S.-born citizen, which means Omar's current marriage carries no immigration implications.
Marriage fraud is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. But with the five-year statute of limitations expired, that charge is off the table. The citizenship paperwork is not.
No formal denaturalization proceeding has been publicly initiated. Every reference to it in the record so far is framed as a potential action, not a completed one. But with ICE citing active enforcement proceedings, the Biden-era DOJ having opened its own probe, and the current administration making public statements about the case, the investigative machinery is plainly in motion.
Omar can dismiss the questions as a witch hunt. She cannot make the paperwork disappear, and neither, apparently, could her father.
