Federal officials announced this week that nearly half of all immigrants in the greater Minneapolis area were found to have committed some form of immigration fraud.
The findings came during a September enforcement sweep and included cases involving sham marriages, falsified death certificates, and other schemes, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edley.
“But the revelation was no great surprise to those of us who have followed the settlement of some 100,000 Somali immigrants in Minnesota over the past three decades,” writes Scott Johnson for the New York Post.
In 2008, the State Department temporarily suspended a family reunification program used by Somali immigrants after DNA testing revealed that about 80 percent of claimed family relationships were not valid.
Officials have cited the episode as an example of persistent concerns over immigration fraud within the community.
“And when it comes to “bizarre schemes,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) serves as Exhibit A,” Johnson noted.
Omar (D-Minn.) has faced longstanding allegations that she married her brother in order to help him obtain legal status in the United States, accusations she has not directly addressed, Johnson added.
In 2016, while Omar was running for the Minnesota state legislature, questions surfaced on a local Somali discussion board suggesting that she had a religious, but not legal, marriage with Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children.
Public records, however, showed that in 2009 she had legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, whom several members of the Somali community identified online as her brother. Omar remained legally married to Elmi during her 2016 campaign, though her campaign website listed Hirsi as her husband and made no mention of Elmi.
Johnson continued:
It appeared that Omar had married her brother for some fraudulent purpose.
As if to put an exclamation point on the scam, the Omar-Elmi marriage license was executed by Wilecia Harris, a Christian minister, despite the couple’s Muslim faith.
When I asked the Omar campaign about her marriages, a criminal defense attorney responded with a message accusing me of bigotry — and failing to respond to my questions.
This has been Omar’s modus operandi ever since.
To this day, the reason for her marriage to Elmi — from whom, she says, she separated in 2011, but which didn’t officially end until 2017 — remains unclear.
