Here's everything we know about the persistent but unproven rumors that Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother, which she has called 'absolutely false and ridiculous'

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is the subject of a conspiracy theory that she married her brother

• President Donald Trump echoed a persistent rumor about Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar saying, "there's a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother" to reporters on Wednesday night.

• Conservative bloggers have for years claimed that Omar's second husband, British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, is her brother and that she married him to help him fraudulently gain a US green card.

• No hard evidence - like a birth certificate -has ever surfaced to prove that Elmi is Omar's brother or that any fraud was committed, especially since he left the US after he and Omar separated in 2011.
• But Omar has still not explained some puzzling discrepancies and inconsistencies in her marriage history that raised questions about her marriages, and have breathed life into allegations of fraud.
• Omar filed joint tax returns with her current husband, Ahmed Hirsi, while still legally married to Elmi.
• Hirsi and Omar also listed the same home address in public court records and temporarily relocated to North Dakota together while she was married to Elmi.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is currently at the center of a firestorm of controversy, finding herself engaged in a feud with House Democratic leadership and on the receiving end of racist attacks from President Donald Trump and some of his supporters.

On Sunday, Omar and three fellow progressive congresswomen were the subject of a series of racist tweets in which Trump told them to "go back and fix the broken and crime-infested places from which they came," and a number of attendees at a Wednesday Trump rally in North Carolina chanted "send her back" after Trump gave an extended monologue criticizing her.

Omar, who was born in Somalia in 1982, came to America as a refugee with her father and siblings in 1995 by way of a Kenyan refugee camp and resettled in Minneapolis, where she officially became a US citizen. Omar was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2016 and to Congress in 2018, one of the first two Muslim woman to serve in Congress.

Read more: Trump repeated an unfounded claim that freshman lawmaker Ilhan Omar married her brother to sneak him into the US

Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Wednesday evening, Trump echoed a persistent rumor about Omar saying, "there's a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it. I hear she was married to her brother," adding, "I'm sure that somebody will be looking at that."

The rumors and allegations that Omar married her brother originated from an anonymous user on a Somali-American internet forum in 2016, and have circulated around the Internet ever since.

Conservative bloggers have for years claimed that Omar's second husband, British citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, is her brother and that she married him to help him fraudulently gain a US green card.

No hard evidence - like a birth certificate -has ever surfaced to prove that Elmi is Omar's brother or that any fraud was committed.

But Omar has still not explained some puzzling discrepancies and inconsistencies in her marriage history that raise questions about her marriages, and have breathed life into to allegations of fraud.

Omar released a lengthy statement when she first ran for office in 2016 to address the persistent rumours that she married her brother, which she called "absurd and offensive," and gave the following timeline of her marriage history:

• She married her first and current husband, Ahmed Hirsi, in an Islamic faith ceremony in 2002 when she was 19, but the couple did not obtain a legal marriage certificate. The couple had two children together between 2002 and 2008.
• Omar and Hirsi split in 2008, also in a faith-based (not legal) proceeding.
• Omar legally married her second husband, Elmi, in 2009.
• Elmi and Omar separated just two years later in 2011, but did not get a legal divorce, and Elmi moved back to London.
• Omar and Hirsi got back together in 2012 and had their third child while Omar was separated but still legally married to Elmi.
• Omar officially divorced Elmi in 2017, and legally married Hirsi in 2018.

But since then, a number of public documents obtained and reported by news outlets including the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Washington Examiner cast doubt on Omar's official timeline of her marriage and relationship history.

Read more: Ilhan Omar calls Trump a 'fascist' after 'send her back' chant: 'Because I criticized the president, I should be deported?'

As the Star-Tribune reported in June, Omar filed joint tax returns with Hirsi in 2014 and 2015 while she was still legally married to Elmi, and was fined by Minnesota's campaign finance watchdog for paying a lawyer with campaign funds to fix the mistake, since federal law prohibits someone from filing joint returns with a person who is not their spouse.

Around the same time, the Examiner published a story reporting that in dozens of publicly-available traffic violation and court records, Hirsi "listed his address at a single Cedar Riverside address consistently in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011," the same address Omar listed in separate traffic violation cases, including during the time he was split from Omar.

The Examiner further discovered a 2013 local news article which said that "Omar and her husband, Ahmed Hirsi, moved to North Dakota so that Omar could finish her bachelor's degree in political science" from 2009 to 2011, the exact timeframe during which she was legally married to Elmi, who also attended North Dakota state.

Complicating matters further, both the Star-Tribune and the Examiner reported that Omar and Elmi listed an address in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights on their 2009 marriage license application - and it was the exact same location Hirsi listed as his home address when applying for a business license with the state government that same year.

Read more: #IStandWithIlhan: Bernie Sanders, George Takei, and Susan Sarandon are among thousands voicing support for the congresswoman after Trump rally attendees chanted 'send her back'

Omar has not yet given a clear explanation as to why so many public documents point to her and Hirsi living together and being romantically involved while she was legally married to another man, but there is no solid evidence to support the theory that Elmi is Omar's brother.

Being a refugee, Omar does not have an original birth certificate, but she released the first names of her six siblings in 2016 and provided a Star-Tribune reporter with photographs of her and her siblings' original refugee resettlement documents and identification cards - none of which listed Elmi as one of her brothers.

"For someone like me, who left a war-torn country at the age of 8, who got refugee status to come to America, where in the world am I finding a sibling 15 years, 20 years later to seek to do what people accuse me of?" she told the Star-Tribune.

The Tribune reported that Omar is the youngest of seven siblings, and Elmi is three years younger than she.

Some outlets and blogs have pointed to social media posts from accounts supposedly linked to Elmi in which he posted photos of Omar during the period of time she claimed in her divorce papers that she wasn't in contact with him, where she seemingly referred to her third child as a "niece."

The accounts have since been deleted, however, and no news outlets have been able to independently verify their authenticity or make contact with Elmi or any other of Omar's family members who could confirm that he and Omar are not related.

Furthermore, the fact-checking site Snopes pointed out some significant holes in the theory that Elmi is Omar's brother and she married him to help him gain citizenship.

They noted that not only did all of Omar's six siblings also gain refugee status in the US, but siblings can sponsor each other for residency status and green card under US immigration law - negating the need for Omar and Elmi to commit fraud by getting married if he really was her brother.

Read more: Rep. Ilhan Omar responds to 'send her back' chant with Maya Angelou poem

One Minnesota-based immigration lawyer told the Star-Tribune that cases of siblings marrying each other to commit immigration fraud are practically non-existent, saying, "it is so rare that you would think that it would be more easily uncovered."

And more importantly, if Elmi's intention was to enter into a fraudulent marriage with Omar to gain a green card and settle permanently in the United States, it doesn't explain why he left the US and moved back overseas to London just two years after getting married, and didn't respond to Omar's attempts to serve him with divorce papers, given that she would have presumably been his sponsor for a green card.

"Since before she was elected to office, Ilhan has been the subject of conspiracy theories and false accusations about her personal life," spokesman Jeremy Slevin said in a June statement to the Star-Tribune. "Ilhan has shared more than most public officials ever do about the details of her personal life - even when it is personally painful."

He added: "Whether by colluding with right-wing outlets to go after Muslim elected officials or hounding family members, legitimate media outlets have a responsibility not to fan the flames of hate."