A respected Minneapolis Somali community member has gone on record with The Daily Mail with claims that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) privately acknowledged more than a decade ago that the man she legally wed in 2009, Ahmed Elmi, was her brother and that the marriage was meant to help him obtain immigration status in the United States.
The allegation comes from Abdihakim Osman, 40, a well-known local blogger who says he knew both Omar and her longtime partner, Ahmed Hirsi, during the years when the controversy first began unfolding, writes the newspaper. Osman is the first individual to publicly state that Omar personally identified Elmi as her sibling and described the purpose of the marriage in straightforward terms.
“She said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school,” Osman recalled. “We all thought she was just getting papers to allow him to stay in this country.”
According to Osman, the suggestion that the pair would legally marry caught nearly everyone off guard. “When she married Elmi, no one even knew about it,” he said. Osman contrasted the secrecy with Omar’s first union — a large public Islamic wedding with Hirsi in 2002 that was widely attended within Minneapolis’s Somali community. Osman said the Elmi marriage was so discreet that “No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later.”
The 2009 marriage was performed by a Christian minister in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, despite the fact that both Omar and Elmi are Muslim. Osman suggested that choice was intentional, arguing that a Somali imam would have immediately recognized the familial relationship and refused to officiate the ceremony.
Omar and Hirsi had religiously separated in 2008, even though they were never formally married under state law. Omar continued living with Hirsi and later gave birth to a third child with him in 2012, all while still legally married to Elmi. Court records show that Omar obtained a legal divorce from Elmi in 2017, and she and Hirsi finally formalized their own marriage in 2018, just ahead of Omar’s successful run for Congress.
Recently, Omar came under attack by Donald Trump as it was revealed that the Somali community began committing Medicaid and other fraud to send millions back to terrorists in their home countries. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been accused of helping the community hide its tracks.
Speculation about Omar and Elmi being siblings first surfaced online in 2016 and has persisted ever since, intensified by the near-total absence of reliable birth documents from Somalia, where civil records were destroyed by decades of war. Omar has consistently rejected the claims, portraying them as politically motivated and rooted in bigotry. She has called the allegations “baseless, absurd rumors.” Her office has declined to discuss the matter further, saying the congresswoman “does not comment on her family or personal life” and is “focused on the work her constituents sent her to Washington to accomplish.”
The renewed scrutiny follows reports last month that the FBI examined Omar’s 2009 marriage as part of an immigration-fraud review. If authorities ever establish that a marriage was arranged solely to obtain an immigration benefit, federal law allows for penalties of up to five years in prison and fines as high as $250,000.
