Trump Admin Investigating Omar For Allegedly Marrying Brother to Illegally Enter US
Trump administration border czar Tom Homan said this week that the Department of Homeland Security is reviewing allegations that Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar may have committed immigration fraud by entering into a marriage with a relative.
President Donald Trump and several of his allies have long asserted that Omar’s first husband, Ahmed Elmi, is her brother and that the marriage, which began in 2009 and ended in divorce in 2017, was arranged to facilitate immigration benefits.
No DNA evidence or official documentation has substantiated those claims, and Omar has consistently denied them.
In an interview with Newsmax, Homan said he is examining whether Omar violated immigration laws and whether her legal status could be affected. Omar’s congressional biography states that she arrived in the United States with her family in the 1990s after fleeing civil war in Somalia.
“We’re pulling the records, we’re pulling the files,” Homan said Monday. “We’re looking at it … I’m running that down this week.”
Homan stated that the DHS is conducting a thorough review of visa fraud within the Somali community in Minnesota, following the department’s claim that 50% of visas issued in Minnesota may be fraudulent.
“President Trump has instructed us to go down, and we’re going to deep dive all of this, and we’re going to hold people accountable,” he noted.
Trump accused the Somali-born congresswoman of marrying her brother to commit immigration fraud during a new interview with Politico released Tuesday.
“I don’t want to see a woman that, you know, marries her brother to get in and then becomes a congressman, does nothing but complain,” Trump said in the interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns, referring to Omar’s alleged 2009 marriage to Ahmed Elmi, who multiple reports and witnesses have claimed is her biological brother.
Trump made the remarks after Omar condemned recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Minneapolis targeting illegal Somali nationals—a crackdown that followed revelations of a $1 billion welfare fraud scheme in Minnesota, portions of which federal investigators say were funneled to the Somali terror group al-Shabaab.
“All she does is complain, complain, complain, and yet her country is a mess,” Trump continued. “Let her go back, fix up her own country. So no, Somalia—and I was right about it.”
The president also accused Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of failing to address the crisis: “They have an incompetent governor there, too.”
Omar has previously called the allegations “baseless and absurd,” dismissing them as Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
But a 2019 Minneapolis Star-Tribune investigation found discrepancies in Omar’s marital and immigration records that she has never fully explained.
According to public records and Daily Mail reporting, Omar married Elmi in a civil ceremony in 2009 while still religiously married to her first husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi. She claimed to have separated from Elmi in 2011, yet did not file for divorce until 2017.
During that time, she and Hirsi had a third child together. Omar later divorced Hirsi again in 2019 after reports surfaced of her affair with political consultant Tim Mynett, whom she later married.
In February 2020, the Daily Mail published explosive testimony from Abdihakim Osman, a Somali community leader in Minneapolis, who said Omar openly told friends that Elmi was her brother and that she “needed to get papers for him to stay in the United States.”
Osman told the outlet, “No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the certificate years later.”
Osman described Elmi as “very feminine in the way he dressed,” saying the Somali community was shocked to learn he had married Omar. “When Ilhan married Elmi, no one even knew about it,” Osman said. “She kept it quiet because an imam would have refused to marry them if he knew they were related.”
Top DHS Special Agent And His Wife Found Dead
A Department of Homeland Security special agent and his wife were found dead in their New Jersey home in what appears to be a murder-suicide, prosecutors said.
Police in Sayreville responded to the couple’s home on Glynn Court around 8 p.m. July 3 and found Kelly Latauro, 46, dead inside the residence, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said.
Her husband, 52-year-old Christopher Latauro, was discovered dead in the backyard.
Both appear to have been shot.
Authorities said Christopher is believed to be the shooter and the case is being investigated as a murder-suicide.
Police told residents to keep away from Glynn Court, from Deerfield Road to Scarlet Drive, briefly because of police activity.
The area was reopened about 40 minutes later, but police remained on scene.
According to NJ101.5, citing DHS records from 2019 and 2020, Christopher was a special agent for the Department of Homeland Security.
Authorities have not said what may have sparked the violence.
Kelly’s sister-in-law Robyn Perlman-Spencer confirmed her death in a Facebook post on July 7, remembering her in a heartbreaking tribute.
“As many of you may now know, my beautiful sister in law Kelly Iatauro was senselessly and suddenly taken from us on Friday. Kelly was a bright light- kind, thoughtful, hysterical, inappropriate, and just one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. She left a lasting impression on anyone that was lucky enough to know her,” Robyn wrote in part.
Sayreville police confirmed officers responded to the Glynn Court residence on July 3 and found both people dead of gunshot wounds.
The incident is being treated as a murder-suicide, and Christopher is suspected to be the shooter, the spokesperson said.
The Department of Homeland Security and Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office did not immediately respond to additional requests for comment on the case.
What began as a heavy police response to a deadly scene left two people dead and the quiet Middlesex County neighborhood stunned.
Investigators are still trying to piece together what happened inside the home leading up to the gunfire.
Separately, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin made headlines last week with an election-related announcement.
Mullin on Friday said officials who don’t cooperate with the administration’s election security efforts may be slapped with fines — and potentially prison time.
“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections — and they chose not to — then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mullin said during a press conference at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Mullin also promised DHS would work to “speed up our security enhancements” for states.
He vowed to hold up federal election security grants until state officials took steps the administration demanded, including running their voter registration lists through a system that checks for non-citizen voters on the rolls.
Mullin made his comments after President Donald Trump’s primetime address on election security Thursday night, when he repeated already known concerns about the security of voting systems, alleged Chinese efforts to get into voter rolls, and aired old gripes about the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
In his remarks on Friday, the DHS secretary focused on DHS’s work with states to secure election systems and scrub voter registration rolls for fraud and concerns about noncitizen voting.
The Justice Department also sent letters this month threatening prosecution to election officials across the country if they don’t remove noncitizens from their voter rolls.
On Friday, Mullin seemed to suggest that the agency was able to estimate the numbers using the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and said 23 states are already working with DHS to analyze voter rolls.
And he criticized the legal challenges that are hindering the administration’s efforts: Last month, a judge blocked the Trump administration from creating a database of information about Americans, including Social Security numbers and citizenship status.
