00:00A federal raid on Representative Ilhan Omar's Washington, D.C. pad has placed the controversial Democrat and her relatively unknown
00:06family in the spotlight.
00:08As Homeland Security investigators near the end to a long investigation into whether Omar was actually older than 17 when
00:15she received automatic U.S. citizenship from her naturalized father, a detail that may put her citizenship in jeopardy.
00:22But what do we know about Omar's relatively secretive family and her father, whom some have claimed misrepresented himself as
00:28a refugee to get U.S. papers?
00:31Here's what we know.
00:32According to Omar's official house biography, the now 44-year-old's family escaped war-torn Somalia when she was only
00:38eight years old.
00:39The family of eight then spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp before landing in the U.S. in
00:44the 90s.
00:45Omar claims she received automatic U.S. citizenship in 2000, granted to minor-age children of naturalized parents, in this
00:53case her father, Nur Omar Mohamed.
00:55But Omar's citizenship has now come under scrutiny based on two rumored allegations, one being that Omar was actually older
01:02than 17 when she was granted citizenship.
01:05So Ilhan Omar has never publicly produced a birth certificate.
01:08She, in fact, has said that her birth certificate and any papers like that were destroyed or gone missing back
01:14in her native country, Somalia, because of the political turmoil there.
01:18Now, we spoke to exclusively a woman from Minnesota who has been following Ilhan Omar for quite some time.
01:26And she discovered that when Omar first ran for office in Minnesota, she listed her birth year of 1981.
01:32Now, this is significant because that would put her being 18 or 19 years old at the time that her
01:38father received naturalization in the year 2000.
01:42So if she was not a minor in the year 2000, then she would not be a U.S. citizen.
01:47The other allegation is related to Omar's father, whom some have claimed misrepresented himself as a refugee to U.S.
01:53officials when he applied for citizenship.
01:55The Minnesota congresswoman has long described her father as an educator who fled his country's devastating civil war alongside millions
02:03of others.
02:04But an expert scholar exclusively told the Post that Nur Omar Muhammad was actually a prominent military commander in the
02:10Somalia dictatorship that killed as many as 200,000 people.
02:13Nur, born in the Somali coastal town of Bandar Bela in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, joined Somalia's military
02:21in the late 60s,
02:22with conflicting reports suggesting he trained in the Soviet Union or Egypt.
02:26He allegedly played a key role in Syed Barr's army after the bloodthirsty dictator seized power in a Soviet-backed
02:33coup in 1969.
02:35Nur's military career came to an end when Barr was ousted in 1991 after two decades of oppression.
02:42Now, this is problematic for her immigration because U.S. immigration law specifically says that people who were
02:51participating in oppression or persecution of any other group back in their home country are not eligible to be refugees
03:00when they come to the United States.
03:01That would mean that if he was, in fact, deemed as someone who was participating in activities that targeted another
03:08group in his home country,
03:09he should not have been eligible to become a refugee, therefore not eligible to become naturalized,
03:13therefore his family and his daughter would not have eligibility to become naturalized U.S. citizens.
03:18Nur died from COVID-19 complications in June 2020 at the age of 67.
03:24Omar has long claimed her mother, Fadhumah Aboukar Haj Hussein, died when she was two years old, and her dad
03:30raised seven kids solo.
03:31But the identities of five of Omar's six siblings have remained entirely unknown.
03:36Omar's one known sister, Sahar Nur, has been pictured with the congresswoman and recently published a memoir about immigrating from
03:43Somalia.
03:43Noor also runs a Minneapolis-based consulting firm that touts the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other groups
03:50as clients.
03:51The New York Times reported that Noor was subpoenaed as part of the federal probe into Omar's immigration paperwork.
03:56Omar has bizarrely never spoken of her other siblings.
04:00Rumor has it that some of the children went to the U.K. while the others came here to the
04:05U.S.
04:05and it's a mystery as to what, who her other siblings are.
04:11Omar's second husband is a man named Ahmed Elmi who lives in the U.K.
04:15and people have long suspected might be her brother.
04:18Of course, Omar has denied this.
04:21Omar has called the accusations that she married her brother to be bigoted and baseless and racist.
04:27This accusation first came up in the Somali community itself in Minnesota.
04:31There were some Somali bloggers who said that when Ahmed Elmi blew into town, he was introduced as her brother
04:39by her.
04:40This is what these people say.
04:42He then needed papers to say in the country and that Omar married him so he could get those papers.
04:48This is what the accusation is.
04:50Contrary to what many people sort of think when they hear the accusations that Omar had married her brother,
04:55they think that so that she could get her papers, the accusation is actually that she did it so he
05:00could get papers, the alleged brother.
05:03This would mean that Omar was already a citizen when she married him.
05:07This is not what DHS is looking at, according to our sources, and for multiple reasons.
05:12There's a statute of limitations on marriage fraud.
05:15Marriage fraud is a very serious crime.
05:17It comes with up to five years in prison, big $250,000 fine, but there's a five-year statute of
05:24limitations
05:24from the last time the couple presented themselves as a legitimately married in any official capacity.
05:30That would have presumably ended in 2017 when Omar and Ahmed Elmi, her alleged brother-husband, divorced.
05:39So that's not what feds are most likely looking at, our reporting seems to indicate.
05:45Omar's current marriage, her fourth, to former campaign staffer and U.S.-born citizen, Tim Minnette, would not shield her from
05:53deportation.
05:54Omar was married to first husband Ahmed Hersey, but only by a non-legally binding Muslim ceremony in 2002,
06:01which is not recognized by the state.
06:03The pair split up in 2008.
06:05In 2009, she married Elmi, long-rumored to be her brother, and a green card marriage,
06:10so he could stay in the country, but which ended in divorce in 2017.
06:14Omar reconciled with Hersey in 2012, and they legally married in 2018.
06:19They divorced a year later.
06:21In March 2020, Omar announced that she had married Minnette, a political consultant who had done work for her campaign.
06:27So if DHS does find there's discrepancy in her naturalization process,
06:32or if she committed outright immigration fraud or naturalization fraud,
06:35what could then happen is first a criminal proceeding, so she would face charges of whatever fraud she committed,
06:43and then following that could come a civil proceeding, which is the denaturalization process.
06:48So she could be stripped of her citizenship, if she ever had any, and kicked out of the country.
06:53Thank you very much.
