Trump promotes lies about Ilhan Omar and suggests she apologize for ‘abandoning’ Somalia

Former President Donald Trump released a lie-filled statement on Tuesday demanding that Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota apologize for “abandoning her former country.” which she fled as a child..

The Minnesota congress member, a Somali American refugee, was born in Somalia in 1982. Omar, along with her father and her siblings, secured asylum in the US in 1995, when she was a child, “Congresswoman Ilhan Omar should apologize for marrying her brother, committing large-scale immigration and election fraud, wishing death to Israel, and for essentially abandoning her former country, which doesn’t even have a government — Exactly what she’d like to see for the United States,” Trump said in his statement.

In a July 2019 tweet, Trump told Omar and three of her fellow Democratic congresswomen to “go back and fix the broken and crime-infested places from which they came” — even though all four are US citizens and Omar is the only one who was born outside the US.

The unsubstantiated rumors that Omar’s ex-husband Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British national, is her brother and that she married him to help him get a green card circulated around the internet and right-wing blogs for years before the former president brought them up Tuesday.

Omar has called the rumors “absurd and offensive” and released a lengthy statement and timeline of her marriage history in 2016, Outlets including Minneapolis’ Star Tribune and the Washington Examiner have uncovered public records and documents that point to Omar living with her other ex-husband, Ahmed Hirsi, while she was legally married to Elmi. But no evidence, like a birth certificate, has ever surfaced to suggest that Elmi is her brother.