Sahra Noor, the older sister of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, no-showed her own book tour event Friday night in Rochester, Minnesota, leaving a Fox News reporter standing in an empty venue with no explanation and apparently nowhere to be. And to be fair, who the heck wants to read a book by Ilhan Omar’s sister?
The event was set for 6:30 p.m. at the Intercultural Student Center at the University of Minnesota Rochester. Garden Party Books had promoted it as a discussion of Noor’s memoir, “Salt in the Snow: A Somali Immigrant Story,” with backing from the University of Minnesota Bookstores and the Rochester Public Library. A Fox News reporter RSVPed through a QR code on the flyer, showed up, and found absolutely nothing. No cancellation notice, no postponement, no forwarding address, just silence and an empty room.
Garden Books eventually explained the cancellation by citing a family emergency involving Noor. Convenient timing, that. The Rochester stop was part of a broader U.S. promotional run for the memoir, which launched at a Nairobi bookstore on August 13, 2026. Noor had already appeared at a literary festival in Cape Town, South Africa in early September, followed by Minnesota dates in Minneapolis on October 1, at the University of Minnesota on October 6, and in St. Paul on October 7. Her next listed stop is October 23 at the Somali Community Cultural Innovation Hub in Seattle, so the tour is presumably still on, just apparently not in Rochester on that particular Friday.
The cancellation drew attention because of what’s been happening around the Omar family lately. You can read more about the Ilhan Omar immigration fraud probe to get the full picture, but here are the highlights. Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington, D.C.-area home on October 12 after a U.S. district judge signed off on a search warrant. They walked out with Omar’s phone, laptop, notebooks, and passport.
According to The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, investigators had already seized a phone belonging to Sahra Noor herself. Text messages from that phone were reviewed and used to help support the application for the warrant that led to the home search. Grand jury subpoenas have since been issued to Noor and several other people connected to Omar as part of an investigation before a grand jury in Minnesota.
The inquiry is examining whether Omar and relatives lied or left out information on immigration forms filed after the family arrived in the United States as refugees in the 1990s following Somalia’s civil war. Investigators are focused on Omar’s stated birth date and her age at naturalization in 2000, whether she properly derived citizenship through her late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, as a minor, and the accuracy of information her father provided about his own background. On top of all that, a separate federal inquiry opened under the Biden administration is looking at Omar’s financial disclosures.
Noor, a health systems consultant, lives in Nairobi, Kenya according to her LinkedIn profile, though she’s been traveling for the book tour. Her next scheduled appearance is October 23 in Seattle. Whether she shows up for that one is anyone’s guess, though at this rate, Rochester bookstore fans might want to call ahead.
