The Justice Department has opened an investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) over allegations of immigration fraud, Vice President JD Vance disclosed Tuesday, giving federal weight to a set of claims that have followed the congresswoman for nearly a decade.

Vance confirmed the probe in response to a question at a White House briefing, taking care to frame the inquiry in measured terms while making clear the administration views the underlying allegations as credible.

“I don’t want to prejudge an investigation,” Vance said. “It certainly seems like something fishy is there, but everybody’s entitled to equal justice under the laws.”

“So we’re going to investigate it. We’re going to take a look at it. If we think that there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute that crime, and that’s something the Department of Justice is looking at right now,” he added.

The vice president, who oversees the administration’s effort to combat federal benefit fraud, has previously gone further. In March, he told reporters that Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud,” referring to long-circulating allegations that the congresswoman’s brief second marriage was to her own brother. Omar’s chief of staff, Connor McNutt, called the assertion “a ridiculous lie” at the time.

The DOJ probe lands at a particularly difficult political moment for the four-term Minneapolis congresswoman, who is simultaneously navigating mounting questions about her possible ties to the Feeding Our Future scandal, the $250 million COVID-era child nutrition fraud scheme that has resulted in more than 70 convictions in her home state.

The immigration questions trace back to Omar’s 2002 Islamic marriage to Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, with whom she had three children. The couple was not legally married in the United States until January 2018. In the interim, in February 2009, Omar entered a civil marriage in a Christian ceremony in Eden Prairie, Minn., with Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen of Somali descent, according to a Hennepin County marriage certificate obtained by the New York Post. The couple divorced in December 2017.

Omar has rarely spoken publicly about the relationship and has consistently denied the central allegation, which surfaced first on the Somali-language discussion board SomaliSpot and was later reported by the conservative magazine City Journal and other outlets. She has described the marriage as brief and said the couple was frequently separated, with only a two-year stretch of cohabitation between 2009 and 2011. The couple has no known children together.

A Minneapolis-based Somali blogger and community organizer, Abdihakim Osman, told the Daily Mail in 2020 that Omar had introduced Elmi to members of the local Somali community as her brother visiting from London in the late 2000s, and that she had said at the time that he was seeking immigration documents. A photograph posted to Instagram by Elmi showed him holding Omar’s third child with a caption referring to “nieces,” according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The photo was subsequently deleted, as were the original SomaliSpot threads.

Omar has previously called the allegations “absolutely false” and the product of a years-long smear campaign rooted in racism and Islamophobia. She has not been charged with any crime.

The Tuesday disclosure represents the first public confirmation that the Justice Department has moved beyond political accusation to an active criminal inquiry. It was not immediately clear which US Attorney’s office is handling the case or how long the investigation has been underway.

The development comes against a wider backdrop of federal and state scrutiny of the congresswoman. The House Oversight Committee earlier this year referred its investigation into the financial disclosures of Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett, to the House Ethics Committee, citing what it called the “apparent rapid growth” of two companies in which Mynett holds ownership stakes. According to a committee letter, those entities, eStCru LLC and Rose Lake Capital LLC, were valued at as much as $51,000 on Omar’s 2023 disclosures and as much as $30 million on her 2024 disclosures. Mynett has not publicly responded to the committee’s questions.

In Minnesota, the Republican-led House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee has spent the spring seeking documents and testimony from Omar relating to the Feeding Our Future scheme. A motion to subpoena her records failed on a tied vote in mid-May, with the committee’s five Republican members in favor and three Democrats opposed. The committee’s chair, Rep. Kristin Robbins, has said Omar’s office did not respond to multiple invitations to testify.

Federal court exhibits from the trial of Aimee Bock, the convicted founder of Feeding Our Future, identified Omar’s office six times, including in an email chain bearing the subject line “Help with USDA Food Program” and in references to a recovered text message thread between Bock and the congresswoman’s office. Bock was convicted in March 2025 of conspiracy, wire fraud, and bribery and is scheduled to be sentenced on May 31.

In an interview with the New York Post over the weekend from federal custody, Bock asserted that Omar had been aware of the scheme, while also accusing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison of having been aware of it. Bock acknowledged in the same interview that she had never personally spoken with Omar and had only dealt with members of the congresswoman’s staff. None of her allegations have been independently corroborated.

A separate strand of state Republican concern has focused on Omar’s authorship of the MEALS Act, which she shepherded into law in March 2020 as a provision of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. Robbins and her colleagues argue that the legislation “took the guardrails off the federal school nutrition program” and created the regulatory conditions under which Feeding Our Future operated.

Omar’s office has rejected that framing. Her former district director, Kendal Killian, wrote to the Minnesota committee earlier this month arguing that the relevant waiver authority was added to the bill by Senate Republicans and signed by President Trump, and was not part of Omar’s original legislative draft.

Omar has previously called the alleged misuse of school meal funds “reprehensible” and demanded answers from the US Department of Agriculture under the Biden administration. She has also pointed out that members of her own family, including her father and a stepmother, were named at various points in connection with smaller related fraud schemes and that she had reported the conduct to authorities.

Vance’s announcement Tuesday was the latest in a series of high-profile public interventions from the vice president on what the administration has labeled benefit fraud, an issue he has made central to his domestic portfolio alongside his role leading negotiations to end the war with Iran. In remarks earlier this spring, Vance described the federal response to pandemic-era fraud schemes as one of the administration’s defining domestic priorities and indicated that further criminal referrals would follow.

For now, the vice president declined to detail the scope of the Omar investigation or any anticipated timeline. “We’re going to take a look at it,” he said. “If we think that there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute that crime.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)