The Compost Bulletin

A short History of the 5th District

Minnesota’s 5th congressional district is a geographically small urban and suburban congressional district in Minnesota. It covers eastern Hennepin County, including the entire city of Minneapolis, along with parts of Anoka and and a slice of Ramsey counties. Besides Minneapolis, major cities in the district include St. Louis Park, Richfield, Crystal, Robbinsdale, Golden Valley, New Hope, and Fridley.

It was created in 1883 and was named the “Bloody Fifth” on account of the first election. The contest between Knute Nelson and Charles F. Kindred involved graft, intimidation, and election fraud at every turn. Some things never change. The district was a Republican stronghold from 1883 until 1962, with only two minor interruptions. But by 1963 things had changed considerably and the Republican hold on the district would disappear, eventually without a trace of its past.

Today the district is strongly Democrat in which Republicans are outvoted, when they even field a candidate, on average by 28 percentage points. It is by far the most Democrat district in the state and the most Democrat district in the Upper Midwest. The Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) has held the seat without interruption since 1963, and Republicans have not tallied more than 40 percent of the vote in almost half a century.

From 1963 to 1978 the district was represented by Donald Fraser. Fraser stepped down from congress after 16 years and ran for mayor of Minneapolis. He would hold that position until 1994. From 1978 to 2007 Martin Olav Sabo represented the district. Sabo was noted as the most liberal member of the house of representatives all of his 28 year career.  In 2007 he announced he would not run for another term and endorsed Mike Erlandson, another staunch liberal, to be his replacement. But the district demographics had changed enormously over Sabo’s years in congress, and Erlandson was soundly defeated in the DFL primary by Keith Ellison, virtually assuring his victory in the general election. Ellison would become the first Muslim elected to the US congress and the first black member of congress elected from Minnesota. He notably took his oath of office on a copy of Thomas Jefforson’s Quran borrowed from the Smithsonian. Ellison served four terms before stepping down to run, and become, Minnesota’s current attorney general.

At this point Ilhan Omar arrived on the scene. The demographics of the district by this time had continued to change significantly. With a completely urban population of 708,000, it is the most populous congressional district in the state. It also boasts the highest poverty rate in the sate at 15% and the highest unemployment rate at 3.7&. It contains some of the poorest areas in Minnesota and some pockets of the wealthiest. It is ethnically diverse, but politically homogeneous. Demographically it is 67% white, 6% Asian, 9% Hispanic, 1% native American and 17% black. A considerable segment of the white population is Jewish, along with a large contingent of recently arrived Southeast Asians from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. The black population is a mixture of recent immigrants and native American blacks. Since the time Keith Ellison was the congressional representative, the foreign-born population has increased by 25,000 people, mostly again from Somalia. Almost all the population growth in the last decade has been due to the influx of Somali immigrants. Ilhan Omar is one of the foreign-born Somalis who has acquired American citizenship.

Ilhan Omar

Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia on October 4, 1982, and spent her early years in the city of Baidoa. She was the youngest of seven siblings. Her father Nur Elmi Mohamed worked as a “teacher trainer”. Her mother, Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein, a Benadiri (a community of partial Yemeni descent), died when Ilhan was two. She was raised by her father and grandfather thereafter. Her grandfather Abukar was the director of Somalia’s National Marine Transport and some of Ilhan’s uncles and aunts also worked as civil servants and educators.  The Siad Barre regime had taken control of Somalia in 1969.  He established a Marxist-Lenist communist government controlled by a military junta and a communist party.  Initially popular, it managed to bring the numerous Somali clans under control and modernize the country and its industry.  Over time the regime became very repressive and by 1991 the country was heading for civil war.

The Elmi family worked for the Barre regime and benefited from it. Ilhan’s aunts and uncles worked as civil servants and educators. Omar’s father trained teachers. Theirs was a blessed life as Somalia began the transition from European colony to independence. Her grandfather rode the winds of change to Italy, where he attended university. He returned to become Somalia’s National Marine Transport director. Abukar oversaw the string of lighthouses along the Arabian Sea coastline.  Privilege accompanied this kind of pedigree. Ilhan’s father worked as a communist party propagandist “teacher”. They lived in a home, which was more like a compound, complete with domestic help. In a country where 80 percent of the population farmed and raised livestock, Omar started kindergarten at age four.

Somalis belong to clans. These ethnic cliques can be about geography, marriage or family relationships. Some possess age-old beliefs of superiority and consider members of sub-clans unsuitable for marriage, even friendship.  In 1991, the reign of Somali President Siad Barre imploded. The country had suffered enough of his Cold War-style military dictatorship. Barre was ousted, the national army disbanded. The ensuing vacuum devolved into a war among clans, turning neighbors into enemies. Ilhan witnessed this firsthand when she was eight years old. She and her family fled Somalia when the Barre regime collapsed. They would spend nearly four years in a Dadaab refugee camp in Garissa County, Kenya, near the Somali border. They would seek asylum in the United States and through were eventually sponsored by Lutheran Social Services. 

After first arriving in New York in 1992, Ilhan’s family secured asylum in the U.S. in 1995. Only the senior Omar and two of the children came to the U.S. Grandfather Aubkar would follow in their wake later. They lived for a time in Arlington, Virginia, before moving to Minneapolis, where her father worked first as a taxi driver and later for the post office. Her father and grandfather emphasized the importance of democracy during her upbringing, and at age 14 she accompanied her grandfather to DFL caucus meetings, serving as his interpreter. Omar became a U.S. citizen in 2000 when she was 17 years old.

Ilhan attended Edison High School and volunteered there as a student organizer. She began her professional career as a community nutrition educator at the University of Minnesota, working in that capacity from 2006 to 2009 in the Greater Minneapolis–Saint Paul area. In 2009 she went to North Dakota State University acquiring a bachelor’s degree in political science and international studies in 2011. She returned to Minnesota after graduation and began her political career as an activist and campaign manager in several local city election races. Omar was a Policy Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs for a short period.

In 2016 Ilhan ran for the state legislature for district 60B. This district includes the Cedar-Riverside area of northeast Minneapolis and had a heavy immigrant population. The seat had been held by Phyllis Kahn for 44 years. She defeated Kahn and Mohamud Noor in the DFL primary and eventually was unopposed in the general election. In 2018, after only one term in the state legislature, she ran for the 5th district congressional seat vacated by Keith Ellison. Her victory was a foregone conclusion and she became the first Somali American to be elected to the US congress. In congress she quickly aligned herself with the most extreme progressives and became a virulent presidential critic.

This would be a “rags to riches” success story of the poor immigrant coming to America and making good, if it were not for a few problems. New information and documents have begun to show some disturbing problems with Ilhan Omar’s entry into the country and her subsequent activities here. New documents revisit questions about Ilhan Omar’s marriage history. Further investigation has revealed questions about her family’s immigration status and how they entered the U.S. as well. And thus begins rest of the story.

The Trail of Lies

On October 22, 2008, the U.S. State Department stopped accepting applications for the Priority 3/Refugee Family Reunification program — the process by which refugees can apply for asylum if one family member is already a legal U.S. resident. The program was halted because DNA testing — primarily of Somalis — had concluded that perhaps 87 percent of applicants were fraudulently claiming family relationships.  Despite continuing war, Somalia of 2008 was not comparable to the open hell of the early 1990s, when an eight-year-old Ilhan and her family fled to Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps. She lived there from 1991 until 1995, aged 8 to 12. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services then helped Ilhan, her sister Sahra, and their father Nur Said receive asylum in the United States along with thousands of other Somalis.

The complicated moral question of fraud, let alone fault, among this 1990s wave of refugees escaping civil war will never be answered with accurate statistics. We will have to settle for adjectives like “widespread” and “rampant.” Yet the negative outcomes cannot be ignored. Even refugees with strong desire to assimilate with Western civic order are hampered by the possible discovery of conflicting documents. And compromising information becomes leverage in a community already difficult to police.

Twelve-year-old Ilhan had no say on the manner in which she arrived in the United States. However, U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Abdullahi Omar is now under scrutiny for acts she took beginning in 2009 — not 1992. In 2009, Omar was a 26-year-old U.S. citizen. She had been a U.S. citizen for nearly nine years. Additionally, the foreign national Omar apparently helped commit fraud was not fleeing hell in 2009, either. Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was a long-time citizen of the United Kingdom. He even possessed a high school diploma from the U.S.. Elmi attended a St. Paul, Minnesota high school for his senior year of 2002-2003, and graduated before returning to London. We look to 1995 not to incriminate a kid, but to answer questions about what Omar did 14 years later as an adult U.S. citizen. The answers to those questions about 2009 appear to give probable cause to investigate Omar for eight instances of perjury, immigration fraud, marriage fraud, up to eight years of state and federal tax fraud, two years of federal student loan fraud, and even bigamy. The facts describe perhaps the most extensive spree of illegal misconduct committed by a House member in American history.

In 1992, Ilhan entered the United States as a fraudulent member of the “Omar” family. That is not her biological family. The Omar family is an unrelated family which was being granted asylum by the United States. The Omars allowed Ilhan, her genetic sister Sahra, and her genetic father Nur Said to use false names to apply for asylum as members of the Omar family. Ilhan’s genetic family split up at this time. The above three received asylum in the United States, while Ilhan’s three other siblings — using their real names — managed to get asylum in the United Kingdom. Ilhan Abdullahi Omar’s name, before applying for asylum, was Ilhan Nur Said Elmi. Her father’s name before applying for asylum was Nur Said Elmi Mohamed. Her sister Sahra Noor’s name before applying for asylum was Sahra Nur Said Elmi. Her three siblings who were granted asylum by the United Kingdom are Leila Nur Said Elmi, Mohamed Nur Said Elmi, and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.  Ilhasn, her father and sister were granted citizenship in 1995.

At the age of 19 she sought a legal marriage license with Ahmed Hirsi in Minnesota in 2002. Ilhan applied for a marriage license, but never submitted it.  Ilhan claimed the marriage was performed in her “faith tradition”.  An Islamic marriage must include the officiant and at least two witnesses, preferably one from each side of the family, to be a valid union. No imam performed Omar’s marriages or signed a marriage certificate.  Like any wedding at a church or synagogue, it’s not legal in the state of Minnesota until processed by the county.  None was ever filed or processed. Similarly, an Islamic divorce requires two witnesses, ideally the same two who witnessed the marriage, plus a three-month waiting period. The marriage can be then dissolved in the faith, although the divorce would require a Minnesota court to earn civil legal standing.

In 2008 Ilhan claimed she and Ahmed Hirsi separated after what she termed “an impasse in our life together”.  Ilhan and Ahmed Elmi, her biological brother, married in 2009,  In the fall of 2008 she and Ahmed Hirsi had moved to Fargo, ND where she attended North Dakota State University (NDSU).  After her marriage to Ahmed Elmi, he too came to Farg and enrolled at NDSU.  Ilhan graduated from NDSU with a degree in political science in 2011.  Elmi stayed on an additional year, and graduated in 2012 and after a short stay in Minneapolis returned to London.   Ilhan claime the relationship with Ahmed Elmi was brief  and  ended in 2011, when she reconciled with Ahmed Hirsi.  In June of that year Ilhan gave birth to their third child.  Records show that during the period that Ilhan and Ahmed Elmi were at NDSU they lived together with Ahmed Hirsi.  Ilhan would always reside with Hirsi even during the period Elmi was still attending NDSU after Ilhan had graduated.  Ilhan identified Ahmed Hirsi as the father of her third child.

The motivation for the sham marriage remains unknown.  It was presumably to benefit Ahmed  Elmi’s ability to come to the U.S and attend college. He could have been allowed to enter as a foreign student with a visa as one of Ilhan’s siblings and even have acquired citizenship through that connection. However, that would have potentially caused scrutiny of the sibling relationship and the use of a false identity and fraudulent family connection to enter the U.S. Since the assumed family names for Ilhan and Ahmed were different, the marriage would facilitate the desired result without arousing suspicion or scrutiny. Siblings who petition for a U.S. visa for a non citizen sibling have typically had to wait more than a dozen years to obtain the document. But according to the U.S. State Department applications for a spouse carry a minimal waiting period. Examples of siblings fraudulently marrying to gain immigration benefits are nearly unheard of compared to cases of strangers marrying to get green cards.  But they do occur.

While Omar said she and Elmi had divorced in 2011 “in our faith tradition,” they would not legally divorce until December, 2017. A month later she was legally married to Ahmed Hirsi. During the period of time she was legally married to Ahmed Elmi, Ilhan Omar filed joint tax returns for several years listingAhmed Hirsi, to whom she was not legally married, as her husband.  When she divorced Ahmed Elmi she used money from her campaign funds to pay her lawyer.  This was both illegal and unethical.  She would eventually pay a $500 fine and was ordered to use her own money to pay lawyers who did personal tax work as well.

A marriage license filed in Washington, D.C., shows Ilhan Omar married political consultant Tim Mynett on March 11, 2020. Omar announced her new marriage with a photo of her and a bearded man smiling and displaying wedding rings. “Got married! From partners in politics to life partners, so blessed,” the post read, without identifying Mynett by name.  She claimed that they had been married both legally and “Islamically”.  Mynett supposedly converted to Islam although there is no evidence of this or an Islamic wedding ceremony.  The civil “ceremony” took place in John Marshall Park next to the Moultrie Courthouse where the couple obtained their marriage license.  Mynett officiated the ceremony himself. 

Under Islamic law a Muslim woman can only marry a Muslim man, although a Muslim man can marry a Christian or a Jewish woman, without their conversion. Muslim “conversion” is simple. All anyone has to do is say out loud the words: ‘There is no true god but Allah and Muhammed is the Messenger of God.’  Interestingly the marriage certificate lists their legal residences separately and neither of them is in Omar’s congressional district in Minnesota.  Their is much suspicion about the marriage in the Somali community in Minneapolis, and Mynett has not been seen practicing his new religion.  Ilhan Omar cryptically tweeted after the marriage, “Somalis, gotta love them. They know gossip is haram (Islamic term for forbidden things), but they love doing it. They know calling a Muslim person kafir (a derogatory term for anyone who is non-Muslim) is haram, but they do it when the person isn’t Somali. ‘They know it’s haram to discriminate against cadaans (white people) in Islam, but they do it.”  Actually them may have good reasons to do so.

Filings with the Federal Election Commission show Omar’s campaign paid Tim Mynett or his firm nearly $600,000 since July 2018.  Family members, including a spouses, can be on the campaign payroll as long as the family member “provides services at a fair market value”.  Omar’s relationship with Mynett had been rumored ever since her separation and divorce from Ahmed Hirsi in 2019.  The relationship was disclosed as part of Mynett’s then-wife, Beth Mynett, filing for divorce.  She accused her husband and Omar of having an affair since 2018. In response, Mynett filed his own court document denying that he told his wife he was in love with Omar and was ending his marriage to be with the congresswoman.  When Omar was asked at the time whether she was separated from her then-husband or dating someone, she responded, “No, I am not.” She has since declined to discuss her personal life, a recurrent pattern of behavior.

In October 2019, she filed for divorce from Ahmed Hirsi, citing an “irretrievable breakdown” in the marriage. That divorce was finalized in November 2019.  Tim Mynett is a founder of E Street Group and met Omar while working for her campaign. He is still a partner at the firm; and Omar confirmed that E Street has a current contract with her campaign.  The Omar campaign has been E Street Group’s biggest moneymaker, bringing in more than $523,000 in the 2020 election cycle alone. It is notable that Omar’s campaign is the firm’s top client, and that they are now “family”.   According to FEC filings, Omar’s campaign paid Mynett or his firm for services including fundraising consulting, internet advertising, website development and digital communications. Several payments were also for travel expenses, some of which were jointly used.

Omar’s sister Sahra Noor was a high-profile executive of the Twin Cities health care nonprofit People’s Center Clinics & Services until 2018.  She currently operates her own health care consultancy in Kenya.  Ahmed Elmi, her brother, is listed as one of her employees. 

Omar has been dogged by questions about her personal life since she first ran for state representative in 2016, with conservatives alleging she was married to Hirsi and another man at the same time and that the other man was her brother. She has called those claims “disgusting lies.”  There is, however, no evidence that the allegations are not true.

Based on stories:
By J. Patrick Coolican, Stephen Montemayor, Roper & Torey Van Oot. Star Tribune June 23, 2019 —  Erin Schaff, New York Times

Data from Wikipedia