A raid of the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Monday morning by federal agents, reportedly as part of an immigration fraud probe, is raising fresh questions about the circumstances of her family’s arrival in the United States more than 30 years ago.
Sources told Fox News that the early-morning search of Omar’s residence in Washington, D.C., stems from a criminal fraud investigation into the congresswoman’s immigration paperwork filed by her late father when she was a child.
Omar’s immigration history has long been the subject of scrutiny since she became the first Somali-born U.S. lawmaker to hold public office. Much of the controversy centers on Omar’s marriage to a man believed to be her biological brother. But top officials in the Trump administration appear to have widened the scope of their investigation to decades-old humanitarian relief claims submitted by the congresswoman’s family.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin indicated in September that federal investigators are examining whether Omar’s family fraudulently obtained refugee status to gain entry into the U.S.
FEDERAL AGENTS CONDUCT PREDAWN SEARCH OF ILHAN OMAR’S HOME IN WASHINGTON
“There may be more to this, the whole family migration and possibly some illegal activity for them to come to the United States to begin with,” Mullin said. “All of this we are investigating. … If we can prove it, that you shouldn’t have been here in the first place, we will deport you.”
Lying to immigration authorities, including willfully misrepresenting a material fact on an asylum application in order to receive humanitarian relief, is a federal crime punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison. The felony offense may involve fabricating one’s origin story or concealing information, such as past criminal convictions, that otherwise would have made an asylum-seeker inadmissible.
Entering the country under false pretenses can result in an applicant’s deportation and even denaturalization, if the foreign national was later granted U.S. citizenship. However, Omar was a child when her father filled out their immigration paperwork, complicating the reported case against the congresswoman.
Omar’s origins
In 1995, Omar’s family was admitted into the U.S. as refugees fleeing the Somali civil war.
Many of Omar’s relatives appear to have held government jobs in Somalia under Siad Barre’s socialist regime, which ruled from 1969 until its overthrow in 1991 by the coalition of rebel militias that had plunged the country into civil war.
According to an interview the congresswoman gave to City Pages, a local Minneapolis newspaper, her aunts and uncles worked as civil servants and educators while Omar’s father trained teachers.
Her grandfather, Abukar Omar, served as the director of Somalia’s National Marine Transport. Maritime transportation is a critical sector in Somalia given that its 2,071 miles of coastline have been a near-constant source of territorial conflicts and trade disputes with neighboring African nations. Omar credits her grandfather with inspiring her to get involved in politics. As a teenager, Omar accompanied him to Democratic Party caucuses in Minnesota, acting as his translator.
Nur Omar Mohamed, the congresswoman’s father, was also a senior officer in the Somali National Army, which was commanded by Barre. After obtaining a military education in Soviet Russia, the elder Omar rose to the rank of colonel and played a significant role leading a regiment in the Somali-Ethiopian war of the late 1970s, according to an obituary remembering Omar’s father. He was recognized for his role in the war launched by Barre, whose invasion of Ethiopia drew backlash from the USSR.
23 years ago, from a refugee camp in Kenya, my father and I arrived at an airport in Washington DC.
Today, we return to that same airport on the eve of my swearing in as the first Somali-American in Congress. #Hope #Ilhan
pic.twitter.com/jVeP3DOipN
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 2, 2019
Several years prior, Barre had seized power in a 1969 coup, declared Somalia a Marxist-Leninist state, and signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union, which hoped that Ethiopia and Somalia could form a communist federation.
Barre’s military dictatorship during and after the conflict sparked the Somali civil war. To maintain control, the totalitarian regime responded to growing dissatisfaction by arresting, torturing, and executing political dissidents. Barre’s reign ultimately ended in 1991, with him ousted and his national army disbanded.
In the City Pages profile, Omar indicated that her family was aligned with the Barre regime — or at least enemies of the resistance — and were scared out of their homeland.
Omar described “militiamen,” armed rebels or clan-based fighters operating outside of the official military, storming her family’s compound in Mogadishu.
“That was a hard realization for my grandfather, that our family was no longer welcome,” Omar recounted. “Even after the attack, he struggled with this new reality.”
A friendly MPR piece on Omar’s immigration story, however, described the home invasion as civil turmoil that pitted neighbor against neighbor in the power vacuum left by Barre.
“Omar’s family home in the city was in the middle of two opposing forces,” the article said.
Following the raid, the Omar family split into groups, with 20 relatives fleeing in total. Omar’s group headed for Kenya, where she would spend the following four years at a refugee camp operated by the United Nations.
Eventually, a Lutheran church sponsored the Omar family’s admission into the U.S. Arriving first in New York City and then living for a time in Arlington, Virginia, they finally planted roots in Minneapolis, home to the country’s largest resettlement of Somali immigrants.
U.S. case law says immigrants can claim refugee status even if they were part of a regime, provided they did not personally participate in or facilitate the persecution of others.
Section 208(b)(2)(A)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act bars an alien from receiving asylum if it is determined that an applicant “ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Biographical discrepancies
Born in Mogadishu in 1982, Omar would have been 12 years old at the time of her family’s resettlement in the U.S. and still a minor when she became a naturalized citizen in 2000.
Conservative critics allege that Omar fraudulently obtained citizenship because the government website for the Minnesota legislature originally listed her birth year as 1981, making her 18 and a legal adult at the time of her naturalization through her father. Foreign-born children automatically become U.S. citizens when a parent naturalizes.
Her birth year on the state legislature’s site has since been corrected to 1982.
“Her birth year is correct,” a note at the bottom of Omar’s government biography now says. “It is incorrectly reported as 1981 in other sources. As of May 24, 2019, Rep. Omar’s congressional staff are working with Wikipedia and the U.S. House to correct her birth year in those sources.”
It is unclear where the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library sourced the information for Omar’s birth year.
Emails obtained by Alpha News, a right-wing publication in Minnesota, showed that the legislative archives center was contacted by Omar’s staff and asked to change her birth year to 1982. As disclosed on the state legislature’s website, the emails also reportedly stated that Omar’s office was trying to edit her personal page on the biographical directory site of Congress as well.
Omar’s congressional campaign previously told the Associated Press that she can’t retrieve her birth certificate because the Somali civil war collapsed the government’s infrastructure.
DID ILHAN OMAR MARRY HER OWN BROTHER? THE CLAIMS EXPLAINED
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told the Associated Press that records on an individual cannot be released without written permission from that individual.
Naturalization records for deceased immigrants, however, can be obtained by a third party.
Omar’s prior Republican opponent, A.J. Kern, requested all available documentation regarding the naturalization of Omar’s father, who died in 2020.
USCIS sent Kern a letter saying that “no record is found to exist” following a diligent search of its database containing the records of all immigrants naturalized after 1906.
The Washington Examiner contacted Omar’s office for comment.
