Buried in a report aimed at discrediting ongoing probes into Rep. Ilhan Omar, The Washington Post divulged fresh evidence suggesting her previous marriage to her alleged brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was a sham.
In recounting the first Trump administration’s ultimately inconclusive investigation into some of the same issues federal officials are examining anew concerning the congresswoman’s background, the Post reveals that Elmi once filed a petition to have his residency status, derived from his marriage-based green card, shifted from conditional to permanent. According to the newspaper, U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) “requested additional evidence due to concerns over the validity of his marriage,” at which point Elmi pulled his application.
This immediately raises three questions: What was it in that application that gave immigration officials pause? Why was it that Elmi dropped his bid to obtain permanent residency if the marriage was legitimate? And did authorities in the first Trump administration vigorously pursue these issues, and are they vigorously pursuing them now to the extent there are potential legal issues arising therefrom not bound by statutes of limitation?
While the Post mentions this matter in passing, there is critical additional context here that the newspaper omitted, which ties Elmi’s abandonment of his permanent residency push to Omar.
Elmi almost certainly filed and then withdrew an I-751 petition. Under federal law, typically, within the 90-day period before “the second anniversary of the date on which an alien obtained” a green card, such aliens must file an I-751 to remove conditions on their residency. Absent circumstances like death or divorce, petitioners must file jointly with their spouses.
Elmi and Omar did not legally divorce until 2017, years after he had left the U.S. and returned to his native United Kingdom. The alleged siblings were married here in 2009. Even if it took an exceptionally long period of time for Elmi to receive his marriage-based green card, that period plus two years almost assuredly would have fallen long before 2017. So presumably, they would have filed their petition jointly.
Per the current instructions for filing an I-751, petitioners must show evidence that their marriage “was entered in ‘good faith’ and was not for the purpose of circumventing immigration laws.” To do so, they must provide a number of supporting documents, like the birth certificates of children, contracts demonstrating joint occupancy/residency, “financial records showing joint ownership of assets and joint responsibility for liabilities,” and “other documents” and sworn affidavits demonstrating one’s marriage is legitimate.
When filing jointly, one’s spouse needs to sign, affirming, under penalty of perjury, that the petition and all supporting documents are “complete, true, and correct.”
Enter Ilhan Omar, and key facts that The Washington Post and others appear to have missed. As I documented in my 2020 book, American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party, during the 2018-19 period, then-State Rep. Ilhan Omar faced an ethics probe resulting in a finding that she had improperly spent $3,400 in campaign funds.
Part of that improper spending centered on legal fees, including to immigration lawyers. Omar hired those attorneys to help her with “crisis management” beginning in August 2016, when, following her historic primarying of a 44-year Democrat-Farm-Labor incumbent in Minnesota House District 60B, word first began swirling that Elmi was Omar’s brother, and her marriage to him constituted a marriage/immigration fraud scandal.
