There’s been a new development – a new twist, actually – in the ongoing immigration controversy surrounding ‘Squad’ Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Omar’s former husband has publicly identified himself as gay, adding a new element to the long-running controversy surrounding their 2009 marriage and allegations of immigration fraud. Ahmed Nur Said Elmi described himself as “a gay man of the East African diaspora” in an academic paper published in August while discussing his research into violence against LGBTQ people in Kenya.
Elmi is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol’s School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, according to his professional and academic profiles. His paper, titled “Out in the Field: Notes on Researching Queer Violence in Kenya,” examined how his own identity affected his fieldwork and interactions with research participants.
“As a gay man of the East African diaspora, my fieldwork was never neutral,” Elmi wrote while describing the personal considerations surrounding his research. The disclosure appears to be Elmi’s first explicit public identification of his sexual orientation and has drawn attention because of persistent questions surrounding his former marriage to Omar.
Omar legally married Elmi in Minnesota in February 2009, several years after entering an Islamic marriage with Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children. For years, Omar’s critics have alleged that Elmi was actually her brother and that the legal marriage was arranged to obtain immigration benefits, claims Omar has repeatedly denied. She subsequently legally married Hirsi in 2018, divorced him the following year and married political consultant Tim Mynett in 2020.
The allegation that Omar and Elmi are siblings has never been conclusively established through publicly available documentation, and Omar has not been criminally convicted of immigration or marriage fraud. The controversy has intensified in recent weeks amid renewed federal scrutiny of Omar’s immigration history and new reporting about an earlier investigation dating to the Obama administration.
Fox News Digital reported this week that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security began investigating the alleged marriage scheme in the Obama administration in 2016, before President Donald Trump was elected.
According to reporting cited by multiple outlets, investigators developed information suggesting the marriage warranted further examination, but prosecutors ultimately did not bring criminal charges. The earlier case reportedly stalled because attorneys determined that any potential criminal offense connected to the 2009 marriage could fall outside the applicable statute of limitations.
