Feds Using DNA To Probe Ilhan Omar ‘Married Her Brother’ Claim, Eye Conspiracy Charge: Report

Federal prosecutors plan to use DNA evidence in their criminal investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), people familiar with the probe told the New York Post on Monday. One source said the DNA is critical to proving the long-running allegation that Omar’s 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi was a marriage to her brother, made so he could get a green card he never received. Omar has denied the claim since 2016, no charges have been filed, and the Justice Department has not confirmed any DNA evidence.

The DNA report is the latest turn in a probe that went public a week ago, when Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington home on Oct. 12. Agents also seized Omar’s phone, and more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas have gone out, some to her relatives, a source told the Associated Press. The grand jury is collecting evidence in Minnesota, where the U.S. Attorney’s Office opened the case. Omar called the search an “attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement” and said, “I will not be silenced.”

The Post’s sources did not say whether the DNA was collected before or after the search. One of them pushed back on earlier reports that investigators went “dumpster diving” for swabs of Omar, Elmi or family members. Reporter Leland Vittert had said on Saturday that agents had done just that, before the raid:

Multiple sources have confirmed to me that federal agents went dumpster diving to get DNA from Minnesota Congresswoman @IlhanMN and her family before the raid on her D.C. home earlier this week. Our reporting suggests investigations go far beyond simple immigration fraud. NewsNation sources say the likely coming indictments will be stunning in nature and far beyond anything the public has understood the case to be about.

— Leland Vittert (@LelandVittert) October 17, 2026

Two other sources told the Post that the search, the DNA and other evidence give prosecutors a solid basis to bring a charge of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud before a grand jury. A conspiracy charge would let prosecutors allege overt acts that fall outside the statute of limitations, former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told the Post. He said prosecutors could pursue a conspiracy case that would likely fall within a 10-year limit, or a civil case, which has none, and that the warrant would not have been executed unless it had “come from the highest levels of the DOJ.”

That fits the warrant. A person familiar with the document told The Washington Post that it lists potential charges of conspiracy, immigration fraud and false statements. Investigators are also looking at whether Omar or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, misstated her birth date on immigration paperwork so she could derive citizenship through him when he naturalized in 2000. Rahmani called her late father “an unindicted co-conspirator.” The Justice Department has not released the affidavit.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, whose department’s agents carried out the search, said on Oct. 16 that “multiple other warrants” were served the same day. “We had a judge sign it, and we expect to be able to take the case to a grand jury,” he told the Charlie Kirk Show, according to CBS News.

The marriage and the birth-date theory lead to different places. A marriage-fraud conviction would not threaten Omar’s own citizenship the way a false-statements case would, the New York Post noted, and stripping the citizenship of a sitting member of Congress would be unprecedented. Border czar Tom Homan said over the weekend that the government has built “a strong case” that could lead the administration to seek denaturalization. As we reported, the Wall Street Journal had already said officials wanted to revoke her citizenship and deport her, and agents reportedly secured her passport in the search.

D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose office is separately examining Omar’s House financial disclosures, told Fox News that “that judge would not have signed that warrant unless there was probable cause.” Those disclosures cut Omar’s reported net worth by tens of millions of dollars in a year, which the Post attributed to an unexplained accounting “discrepancy.”

Omar’s lawyers, Amy Jeffress and Joshua Matz, answered last week with a letter to the Justice Department demanding the “immediate return” of everything seized. They wrote that agents ignored a magistrate judge’s “special requests” for carrying out the search and broke longstanding DOJ policy by acting so close to an election, and that President Trump has “made no secret” of wanting to target her. A DOJ spokesperson called the letter “riddled with false allegations and inaccuracies” and said leaking it was “a publicity play.” Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on House Judiciary, had already called the search “blatant political intimidation,” coming 22 days before the Nov. 3 election. Former federal prosecutor Jim Trusty told Fox News the warrant shows “at least probable cause,” but that it is “a long way off from proving a case at trial.”

The marriage record at the heart of the DNA claim is tangled. Omar and Elmi divorced in 2017, and she gave birth to her third child while legally married to him. Her marriage to Ahmed Hirsi was not legally entered into until after her divorce from Elmi was finalized, the Post reported, although the two had a Muslim ceremony in 2002. She filed joint taxes with Hirsi in 2014 and 2015 while still legally married to Elmi, from whom she had separated in 2011. Elmi, who lives in the UK, applied for a marriage-based green card and withdrew it in 2019 when immigration officials asked for more evidence, according to The Washington Post, which also quoted a former immigration official saying the brother claim was investigated during Trump’s first term without enough evidence to go forward. Omar divorced Hirsi in 2019 and married political consultant Tim Mynett.

We reported last week that her staff asked Minnesota’s legislative library in 2019 to change her birth year, and that Mynett snapped at a reporter over rumors she had fled the country. Mynett has said only that his wife “came here when she was 12 years old as a child war refugee.” Her lawyers say there is “no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status.”