Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin publicly declared that Rep. Ilhan Omar "married her brother" to game the immigration system, and said a federal investigation could end with her deportation.
Mullin made the assertion Thursday at a GOP midterm convention in Dallas, speaking with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson. The DHS chief did not hedge. He said the department has an "ongoing" investigation into Omar, the Somali-born Minnesota Democrat who became a naturalized citizen in 2000 at age 17, and that the probe could reach well beyond one fraudulent marriage.
The New York Post reported Mullin's on-the-record remarks, which represent the most direct statement any sitting Cabinet official has made tying Omar to immigration fraud and raising the prospect of stripping her status.
"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."
He went further, suggesting the case may extend to Omar's broader family immigration history.
"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."
Mullin took pains to separate the investigation from partisan score-settling. He told Johnson the department wants any case it brings to stand on its own merits.
"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 also laid out the legal stakes plainly. Lying on an immigration application carries no statute of limitations, Mullin said. If the government can prove an applicant should never have been admitted, deportation remains on the table, regardless of how many years have passed or what office the person holds.
"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."
Marriage fraud is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
The allegations against Omar are not new. They first surfaced at least a decade ago on SomaliSpot, a Somali politics discussion board, though those posts were later deleted. City Journal previously reported on the removal of those early claims. But the documentary record that followed has kept the questions alive.
A Hennepin County, Minnesota, marriage certificate, previously obtained by the New York Post, shows Omar legally wed Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a UK citizen, in February 2009. She dissolved that marriage in December 2017, one month before legally marrying Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi in January 2018.
Omar has claimed she and Elmi were separated for much of their marriage, living together only between 2009 and 2011. But a detail from 2012 complicates that timeline. The Minnesota Star Tribune reported in 2019 on an Instagram photo that showed Elmi holding a newborn girl he referred to as his niece. The photo was posted in June 2012, the same month and year Omar's youngest daughter was born. The photo was later deleted.
Abdihakim Osman, a Minneapolis-based Somali blogger and community leader who told the Daily Mail in 2020 that he knew Omar growing up in Minnesota, offered his own account. Osman said Omar had introduced Elmi as her brother from London to members of the Somali community in the late 2000s. He said she told people at the time that her sibling was looking for "papers", a reference to immigration documents such as a green card.
"No one knew there had been a wedding [to Elmi] until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later."
That account, a community member saying Omar herself identified Elmi as a sibling before the marriage certificate surfaced, is one of the most damaging pieces of the circumstantial case. If accurate, it means the "brother" label did not come from political opponents. It came from Omar.
Omar has denied the claims repeatedly. In 2016, she told MPR News that the accusations were baseless.
"Insinuations that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is my brother are absurd and offensive."
Earlier this year, her chief of staff Connor McNutt issued a sharper dismissal, calling the allegations "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."
McNutt's statement attacked the motives of those raising the issue but did not address the specific evidence, the marriage certificate, the Instagram photo, or Osman's account. Omar herself has not provided documentation disproving the sibling allegation, such as family records showing she and Elmi are unrelated.
Vice President JD Vance told Benny Johnson in March that the administration considers the fraud allegation credible.
"We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America."
President Trump reinforced that position in May, telling a crowd that he believes Omar "married her brother, which is totally illegal."
Three of the most senior officials in the federal government, the president, vice president, and the Cabinet secretary who oversees immigration enforcement, have now stated publicly that they believe Omar committed fraud. That is an extraordinary alignment of executive-branch pressure on a sitting member of Congress, and it raises the stakes for DHS to either produce a case or explain why it cannot.
The DHS secretary's remarks in Dallas came against a backdrop of heightened public attention to immigration enforcement failures. In a separate case, Mullin himself commented on the death of Cameron Lyon, a 23-year-old Ohio teacher killed in a crash allegedly caused by a previously deported illegal immigrant named Alvaro Uribe-Gonzalez. Uribe-Gonzalez had been removed to Mexico in April 2020 but illegally re-entered the country at an unknown date. He was charged with aggravated vehicular homicide, DUI, and driving without a valid license. ICE lodged a detainer after the arrest.
Fox News reported that Mullin called the death "an unconscionable tragedy because it was preventable", though the quote was attributed to Republican Ohio gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy. Mullin separately said of the victim: "Cameron had his whole life ahead of him, and that life was stolen by this criminal who never should have been in our country in the first place."
The two cases are different in kind, one involves a sitting congresswoman accused of fraud, the other a fatal crash caused by an illegal immigrant who evaded a prior deportation order. But Mullin's willingness to speak bluntly about both reflects a DHS posture that treats immigration law violations as serious regardless of the offender's station. A drunk driver who killed a young teacher and a federal lawmaker who may have gamed the system to bring a relative into the country both fall under the same principle: the law applies to everyone, and lying on immigration paperwork carries consequences.
For all the force of Mullin's public statements, significant gaps remain. He has not disclosed which unit within DHS is running the investigation, when it formally began, or who authorized it. He has not explained the evidentiary basis behind his assertion that "we know" Omar married her brother, whether that rests on documents, witness interviews, foreign government records, or something else.
No formal charge, subpoena, or legal filing against Omar has been made public. Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who Mullin says now lives in London, has not made any public statement addressing the allegations. And the deleted Instagram photo and deleted SomaliSpot posts, two pieces of the circumstantial puzzle, raise the question of whether that material was preserved by any outlet or government authority before it disappeared.
Omar's denial, meanwhile, has remained largely static since 2016. Her office has not produced records establishing that she and Elmi are unrelated, nor has it offered an alternative explanation for why Osman and other community members say she introduced Elmi as her brother.
Strip away the political noise and the facts are straightforward. A Hennepin County marriage certificate proves Omar married Elmi. A community leader who knew her says she called Elmi her brother before the marriage. A deleted Instagram photo places Elmi with what he called his niece, born the same month as Omar's daughter. The DHS secretary says his department is investigating. The vice president says the administration believes fraud occurred. Omar says the whole thing is a lie but has not produced evidence to disprove the specific claims.
That is not a conviction. But it is more than a rumor. And the American public, the same taxpayers who fund every federal benefit, every congressional salary, and every immigration system Omar used, deserve a resolution, not another decade of unanswered questions.
If the evidence is there, bring the case. If it is not, say so. What the country cannot afford is a government that makes accusations from convention stages and never follows through, or a congresswoman who hides behind insults when the paper trail points the other way.
