This week, federal officials made an astounding announcement: Nearly half of all immigrants in greater Minneapolis were found to have committed some form of immigration fraud.
The fraud, uncovered in a September sweep, came in all kinds — sham marriages, fake death certificates and “other bizarre schemes,” as US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edley put it.
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.
As far back as 2008, the State Department temporarily suspended one of the family reunification programs used by Somali immigrants when DNA testing of applicants found that 80% of all its claimed family relationships were fake.
Immigration fraud in this community has been the norm.
And when it comes to “bizarre schemes,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) serves as Exhibit A.
Omar is accused of, and has never credibly denied, marrying her brother to get him legal papers.
In 2016, following up on a tip posted on a local Somali discussion board, I found that Omar — then a first-time candidate for the Minnesota state legislature — had “religiously married,” but not legally married, Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children.
However, records showed that in 2009, she had legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — a man identified as her brother by Somalis on the discussion board.
Omar was still married to Elmi as she campaigned for state office in 2016, although her website made no mention of him and touted Hirsi as her husband.
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.
One Somali source told the Daily Mail that Omar claimed she was trying to help her brother get US student loans.
Other Somalis in Minneapolis told me that Elmi had been living an openly gay lifestyle in London, as amply depicted in then-public social media posts.
The marriage, they believed, was a family ploy to remove him from his life in London (to which he later returned).
Then, in 2018, Omar was elected to Congress.
Halfway through her first term, documents from a state campaign finance investigation revealed joint tax returns that she filed with Hirsi while legally married to Elmi — as well as internal campaign deliberations showing how her aides struggled to formulate a response to the issue of her marital history.
Campaign consultant Ben Goldfarb confided that the situation was impossible to explain without making it even more confusing, a political understatement for the ages.
Omar herself has flatly denied any family ties to Elmi, calling the charges “baseless.”
But multiple investigators have analyzed the documentary evidence. They’ve found nothing to support her denials — and an extensive trail of public records, photos and social media posts confirming their sibling status.
When the Minneapolis Star Tribune assigned two reporters to look into the story in 2019, they all but begged Omar for an interview and permission to interview family members.
She refused.
Indeed, the Star Tribune reporters got the same treatment I did: Omar alleged that the left-leaning daily was bigoted too.
On most subjects, Omar won’t shut up.
On this one, the cat has her tongue.
Yet immigration fraud may be the least of the offenses committed by Minnesota’s Somali community.
A number of local Somali residents participated in the massive Feeding Our Future fraud case — the largest COVID fraud discovered so far in the United States — with losses to taxpayers exceeding $250 million.
Acting US Attorney Joe Thompson, who has prosecuted the two Feeding Our Future cases that have gone to trial so far, recently revealed expansive Medicaid fraud schemes featuring Somali perpetrators. Thompson estimates these frauds to run into the billions of dollars.
Ilhan Omar has proved untouchable, but others aren’t so lucky.
USCIS Director Edley has done us the favor by highlighting these frauds for a national audience, and hopefully justice will be done.
