Minnesota welfare-fraud case has charged about 100 people

In a Wall Street Journal interview published Saturday, Rep. Ilhan Omar denied allegations that she committed immigration fraud and that she married her brother — claims that Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said earlier this month are under continuing federal investigation. Mullin told a conservative podcaster earlier in September that federal officials are looking into Omar’s past marriage and how her family immigrated to the United States. He said Omar “married her brother to try to bring him into the United States,” an accusation she has disputed for more than a decade.

In the interview, Omar dismissed the insinuation. “They are obsessed with insinuating something that is disgusting,” she said. “People have complicated lives. I’m not giving marriage advice.”

A Minnesota welfare-fraud investigation has charged roughly 100 people so far, most of them Somali immigrants, with total losses estimated between $300 million and billions, though final figures remain unknown, the Journal reported. As the only Somali member of Congress, Omar has been drawn into the political fallout from the scheme, which President Trump and congressional Republicans have cited on the campaign trail.

Omar, 43 years old, condemns the theft. Asked why so many Somalis were involved, she noted that those charged represent only a fraction of the state’s more than 100,000-member Somali community and rejected suggestions that community members should have done more to police themselves. “What you are insinuating is that people are walking around trying to figure out what other people are doing with their lives,” she said. “You would hope that people go about their own business, and let others go about their own.”

She hesitated when asked whether the state government had failed in its oversight role before offering a brief “sure” with no further elaboration.

Recurring target of Trump and congressional Republicans

Omar said in the interview that her willingness to go on the offensive extends back to childhood. As a child, she sometimes struck first if she suspected someone was about to fight her, she said, figuring that as “a tiny girl,” “the element of surprise was an advantage.”

That instinct was on display earlier this year when a man sprayed Omar with apple-cider vinegar from a syringe at a Minneapolis town-hall meeting. Her first instinct wasn’t to cower but to chase him with raised fists, the Journal reported; Omar said in the interview that it isn’t in her nature to back down.

Omar and Trump were first elected on the same November 2016 night — Omar to the Minnesota legislature, Trump to the presidency — and the two have feuded since. Two days before that election, Trump held an airport rally in Minnesota targeting the state’s Somali community and claiming residents had “suffered enough” from their presence. The Minnesota fraud has since amplified his criticisms.

Trump has mentioned Omar at least 20 times in social-media posts this year and frequently brings her up in cabinet meetings and public appearances, according to the Journal. At this year’s State of the Union, Trump called Somalis “pirates” who have “ransacked Minnesota” by stealing billions in taxpayer dollars through the fraud scheme. While Democratic leaders urged “silent defiance,” Omar shouted that Trump was a liar. “He was personally insulting me,” she said.

Omar said she routinely receives death threats and sometimes hires her own private security for her monthly town-hall meetings and other events. She rejected comparisons between her political instincts and Trump’s: “I don’t think I’ve ever incited violence against anyone,” she said. She attributed the hostility directed at her to what she called a “self-esteem” problem among “right-wing” conservatives. “They detest any success of immigrants, of women, of minorities that is celebrated,” she said. “My victory in 2016, in winning the statehouse race, catapulted me to national spotlight and garnered national and international headlines. I think it created a bitter spot for them and they’ve never been able to let it go.”

Role in the progressive faction

Omar took office in Congress in January 2019 after winning election in November 2018, as part of the original “Squad” — a group of four progressive congresswomen of color elected that year that also includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.). The group has clashed with Democratic leadership and been vocal Trump critics. The four would have more power if Democrats win House control; Ocasio-Cortez, who has tempered her rhetoric in recent months, is often mentioned as a Senate or even 2028 presidential candidate.

The Journal reported that Omar “will soon have more far-left company in the House, given an incoming class that includes more progressives and even socialists after primaries picked them from safely blue districts like hers.” Those incoming freshmen “often share her relish for a fight and hold policy positions outside the mainstream, sometimes causing party leaders headaches,” the paper added.

In Omar’s district office, inside a building once home to the musician Prince’s middle school, there is a painting that includes three of the four original members of the Squad, the Journal reported.

Omar represents Minnesota’s 5th District, where former Vice President Kamala Harris won roughly 80% of the 2024 vote, leaving her little need for bipartisanship. From her perch, she pursues progressive goals such as Medicare for All. Blois Olson, who publishes a newsletter on Minnesota politics and has followed Omar’s career from the start, said Omar “was among the first signals that the more socialist-aligned Democrats were gaining a stronghold in Minneapolis and beyond.”

Omar does not hold a formal leadership position in her party but remains a high-profile campaign surrogate. The Journal noted that winning statewide office would be challenging for her and that constitutional requirements bar non-natural-born citizens from the presidency, but those barriers have not diminished her own assessment of her legacy. She campaigned this year for Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialists of America member who nearly won the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin governor, and for Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Senate nominee in Michigan. Multiple speakers at the recent GOP convention in Dallas held Omar up as an example in their criticism of Democrats, the Journal reported.

In the interview, Omar said her place in American history is secure. “I’m inked into this nation’s history,” she said. “If I, you know, pass away tomorrow, there will be history books that mention Congresswoman Omar was here.”

Background and family history

Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1982 into an affluent family, according to her memoir “This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey From Refugee to Congresswoman.” As a child, she enjoyed a level of comfort unusual in a country with widespread poverty and violence: The family had a Toyota Corolla, a personal driver and a guarded compound. She lost her mother when she was in preschool and was raised by her father and other relatives as “a self-described spoiled youngest child,” she wrote.

When she was eight, civil war broke out. After surviving a direct attack on their home, her family fled to Kenya and lived in a refugee camp for several years. Omar writes that her family secured “a golden ticket” to America, but her first impressions on landing in New York were not positive; she saw piles of garbage and homelessness.

The family initially settled in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., then moved to Minnesota as she entered high school. Following her high school graduation, Omar married at the age of 18 and began taking classes in a two-year degree program that met at the Mall of America. Shortly after she began those classes, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks happened, and amid the anti-Muslim sentiment that followed, Omar started wearing a hijab in the United States for the first time to show solidarity with her fellow Muslims.

She graduated from North Dakota State University in 2011, near age 30, and went on to work in school nutrition outreach, volunteer for political campaigns and take a job at Minneapolis City Hall. Omar said she is still paying off her own student loans after helping put her three children through college. Asked whether student debt should be wiped away for everyone, she said, “of course I do.”

A longtime critic of Israel, Omar argues it should not receive “a single penny” of U.S. aid because of “genocide” in Gaza. She rejects accusations of antisemitism made against her over the years, calling a controversial 2019 “all about the Benjamins” tweet a “generational misunderstanding” referencing a rap song rather than an antisemitic trope.

Marital history and congressional review

Omar’s marital history has been a recurring element of her political profile. Within days of her August 2016 primary victory, she disclosed details about her relationships after questions were raised about whether she had been married to two men at the same time. An Associated Press fact-check in 2019, citing public records, concluded she had not; she divorced one spouse in 2017 and married another in 2018.

“How could I be married to two people at the same time?” she said in the interview.

Her current husband, Tim Mynett, is a former political consultant who previously worked on her campaign and is now involved in several businesses, including a venture-capital management firm in Washington, D.C., and a winery in Santa Rosa, California. Mynett’s ex-wife, a doctor who lives in Washington, D.C., said in her 2019 divorce filing that her then-husband left her for Omar following an affair. A nonpartisan entity charged with reviewing congressional misconduct allegations recently cleared Omar of wrongdoing in connection with disclosure documents she submitted that significantly overstated her household’s assets, the Journal reported.

In the interview, Omar said she was never married to her brother and never committed immigration fraud.