Responding to a question about Ilhan Omar’s marriage to her brother, Vice President Vance announced that he “definitely” believes Omar committed immigration fraud and that the administration is actively looking into legal remedies:
So we actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” Vance said. “And I talked to [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller about this actually recently. We’re trying to look at what the remedies are. That’s the thing that we’re trying to figure out is what are the legal remedies now that we know that she’s committed immigration fraud? How do you go after her? How do you investigate her? How do you actually do the thing? How do you build the case necessary to get some justice for the American people?
I’ve been writing about Omar’s marriage to her brother since August 2016, when she was nothing more than a candidate for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives. I wrote about it, most recently, in the Free Beacon column “Yes, Ilhan Omar married her brother.” When it comes to this subject, I must be the O.G., although Preya Samsundar and David Steinberg followed up and took the investigation far beyond my own.
Omar got around to terminating her marriage to her brother in December 2017. Her marriage to her brother was void from the git-go. In that sense the divorce was superflous. She was only tying up loose ends for the sake of public appearance.
Omar divorced her brother just in time to marry and divorce the father of her children. He was the guy whom she was advertising as her husband when she was first running for state office in 2016, at the time I first asked her about her marriage to her brother. Again, she was only tying up loose ends for the sake of public appearance. She divorced him just in time to marry her current husband.
Incidentally, in 2019 the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board released the documents it had compiled investigating Omar for violations of state law in her 2016 campaign. Internal campaign documents reflect that her handles filed a FOIA request for documents involving her brother’s initial entry into the United States. I wonder if Vance has had a look at those documents.
Vance says Omar committed immigration fraud in connection with her marriage to her brother, but Omar herself was already a citizen at that time. She didn’t marry him to become a citizen. She may have married him to facilitate his becoming a citizen. However, he preferred to return to his previous life in Great Britain. He never did become a citizen.
Omar obviously married her brother for some fraudulent purpose. Yet all the related events — marriage, divorce, and everything in between — took place almost a decade ago or more. Any related crimes she committed appear to be barred by statutes of limitations.
Omar was naturalized in 2000 at the age of 17 or 18. Omar has been jiggering references to move establish that she was 18 at the time of her naturalization. See this December 2025 Alpha News story.
Omar’s age at the time of her naturalization could raise an issue. If Omar was 17 at the time of her naturalization and obtained citizenship through her father, that might make the validity of her citizenship dependent on the fact and validity of her father’s naturalization. Vance doesn’t mention this, but I have no idea what else he could be talking about.
It is encouraging that the administration is taking Omar’s case seriously. They are interested in her obviously fraudulent marriage to her brother, and yet that appears to me to be a dead end. It would be nice to get some clarity on what they are looking at.
