Vice President JD Vance said on Friday that Somali-born Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America” and added that the Trump administration is seeking to “go after her.”
Vance, who is leading President Donald Trump’s anti-fraud crackdown throughout the United States, was asked about fraud allegations against Omar by conservative commentator Benny Johnson.
“We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” Vance said. “And I talked to [Trump adviser] Stephen Miller about this recently, we’re trying to look at what the remedies are.”
“What are the legal remedies now that we know she’s committed immigration fraud? How do you go after her? How do you investigate her? How do you build the case necessary to get some justice for the American people?” Vance added.
As Trump zeroed in on investigating fraud in Minnesota in recent months, he brought up allegations that Omar married her brother to help him obtain a green card. Trump has also called for Omar to be “thrown out of the country.” People convicted of immigration fraud could be denaturalized and deported under U.S. law, and people can be convicted for fraudulently helping another person obtain naturalization.
Omar arrived in the United States as a refugee in 1995 and became a U.S. citizen in 2000, when she was just 17 years old. Nine years later, Omar married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, whom some allege is her biological brother. Omar has been accused of marrying Elmi, who was a British citizen at the time, so he could obtain a green card. Omar and Elmi reportedly separated in 2011, just two years after their marriage, and officially divorced in 2017.
Elmi was Omar’s second husband. She married Ahmed Hirsi in a religious ceremony in 2002, but never made the marriage legally valid. Omar said she split from Hirsi, the father of her three children, in 2008, just one year before she married Elmi. Omar and her first husband reconciled just months after separating from Elmi.
Omar, one of the most liberal lawmakers on Capitol Hill, has denied the accusations that she married her biological brother, calling them “absurd and offensive.”
Vance also said that Omar is being scrutinized over her connection to “a lot of the worst fraudsters in the Somali community” in Minneapolis. The vice president told Johnson that he’s “not certain” that Omar was aware of the fraud being committed in Minnesota, but added, “We certainly need to investigate it.”
“I’m worried about the immigration fraud,” Vance said. “I’m also worried about what did Ilhan Omar know about what was happening in the Somali community, and why was nobody looking into it until, frankly, Donald Trump came along?”
Federal prosecutors have uncovered billions of dollars of fraud in Minnesota in recent years. The massive fraud scandal resulted in dozens of convictions and involved many people from Minneapolis’s large Somali community.
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