Far-left Democratic U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, who represents Minnesota’s 5th congressional district, which includes Minneapolis, isn’t the only immigration fraudster in the big city.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) uncovered fraud in nearly 50 percent of the cases its officers looked at in Operation Twin Shield.
During a news conference yesterday, USCIS chief Joseph Edlow detailed fraud that “should shock all of America,” as he put it.
Edlow did not discuss the radical Omar, who married her brother to commit immigration fraud. Nor did Edlow or USCIS discuss who is committing the fraud that the agency disclosed. Somalis are the most likely culprits. They have overrun the city, which has become a major terrorist recruiting hub.
The announcement follows federal charges filed against eight people in Minneapolis for their role in a housing destabilization fraud scheme.
The agency discovered at least 275 cases of outright immigration fraud after “site visits and targeted verifications for applicants and petitioners with pending immigration benefits who matched specified risk criteria,” USCIS reported.
USCIS conducted the operation pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order 14161, “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threat.”
Agents proved “marriage and family-based petitions, employment authorizations, and certain parole-related requests.”
The operation, USCIS reported, targeted “more than 1,000 cases that had fraud or ineligibility indicators.” As well, agents “conducted over 900 site visits and in-person interviews, and found evidence of fraud, non-compliance, or public safety or national security concerns in 275 cases — 44 percent of cases interviewed.”
Edlow detailed the scams the immigrants are running.
In one potentially dangerous case, an immigrant who overstayed his visa “was the son of a known or suspected terrorist on the no-fly list,” Edlow said:
He had previously been found to have engaged in marriage fraud, which resulted in the denial of several immigration benefit requests. He was arrested and is now presently being returned to his country of origin.
One immigrant obtained a fake death certificate in Kenya for $100, Edlow said, to prove he was no longer married. In fact, he has a wife in Minneapolis. The couple have five children. He also has a wife in Sweden with whom he fathered three children.
“In another case, an alien entered the United States without inspection in 2023 was released by Border Patrol,” Edlow continued:
The alien married a U.S. citizen while in removal proceedings and was interviewed at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul USCIS field office just last week, where both he and his American spouse stated under oath that their marriage was legitimate. The USCIS officers conducting the interview were suspicious. The site visits were authorized the same day. The American spouse ultimately that afternoon admitted the marriage was fraudulent and entered into solely for immigration purposes and withdrew her petition for that alien.
In another case, an immigrant “an alien engaged in marriage fraud by taking advantage of an elderly U.S. citizen spouse, including threats and severe neglect.” The family obtained a divorce from the dangerous fraudster, “but the family still lives in fear of retaliation … over the failed marriage-fraud scam.
Considering what the Justice Department official announced on September 18, Minneapolis appears to be a nexus for all kinds of fraud.
On September 18, DOJ announced federal felony charges against eight individuals — none of whom are named Smith, Jones, or Johnson — who “devised and carried out schemes to defraud federally funded health care benefits collected within Minnesota’s Housing Stability Services Program.”
“These providers acquired the names of Program-eligible beneficiaries from facilities like addiction treatment centers,” DOJ alleged:
They then used those individuals’ information to submit inflated and fake reimbursement claims. In this fashion, the providers acquired substantial pay-outs of taxpayer money to which they were not entitled. They used those ill-gotten gains for their own enrichment.
President Trump asked whether Omar knew any of the defendants.
Trump had also accused Omar — an obvious Somali agent of influence in Congress — of immigration fraud.
That fraud is what Edlow didn’t discuss.
Omar married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British subject, to keep him in the United States. That information came from a top Somali leader in Minneapolis, and in a major investigation by the Powerline Blog.
Abdihakim Osman, the Somali leader, confirmed the marriage and told the Daily Mail that Omar admitted she would “do what she had to do to get [Elmi] ‘papers’ to keep him in U.S.” As well, Osman told the Mail, “she said she needed to get papers for her brother to go to school. We all thought she was just getting papers to allow him to stay in this country.”
Omar, who denies the consanguineous marriage, also committed student-loan fraud, allege critics who have looked into her shady past. Powerline published a multipart report in 2018 about Omar that led Judicial Watch to lodge a complaint to the House Ethics Committee in July 2019.
“Rep. Omar’s conduct may include immigration fraud,” Judicial Watch observed:
It appears that Rep. Omar married her brother in order to assist his emigration to the United States from the United Kingdom. The same immigration fraud scheme may have aided Mr. Elmi in obtaining federally-backed student loans for his attendance at North Dakota State University. Mr. Elmi and Rep. Omar simultaneously attended North Dakota State University and may have derived illicit benefits predicated on the immigration fraud scheme.
In January 2020, the New York Post reported that “two FBI agents held an hours-long meeting in Minnesota in mid-October with a concerned party who handed over a trove of documents regarding Omar’s 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a source with knowledge of the event said.”
Omar is still in Congress representing Somalia.