It is fascinating to see the truth finally coming out on Ilhan Omar — her sketchy background and her likely immigration problems. If these problems are legitimate, they will cost her House seat and make her deportable to the sunny land of her birth.
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I find it particularly interesting that naturalization papers cannot be found for her dad, Nur Mohamed. Her citizenship application is derivative of his, and if he is a phony, so is she.
Nur was formerly a colonel in the army of dictator Siad Barre, who may have had a hand in the many war crimes of the regime. Barre was closely aligned with Egypt and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. But when Sadat threw out the Soviets from Egypt and made peace with the West, he had to flip, too, Egypt being his primary supporter — especially due to the ongoing conflict he had with Soviet-backed Ethiopia.
At that point, lots of American diplomats and intel officers flooded into Mogadishu, eager to debrief Somali officials and put them on the payroll. I am sure Nur, and all his mid-level colleagues, had their own personal handler from State or CIA, eager to get the latest gossip in Muslim/Communist/terror circles of the 1980s.
Barre’s side, however, eventually lost a civil war, and Nur was forced to flee to Kenya, then came to America in 1995.
Now, the U.S. does have a special visa program for high-ranking sources or defectors, the S Visa (non-immigrant). This is essentially a continuation of Operation Paperclip, when, after WWII, we recruited many top German scientists and technicians, often with human rights issues, which were ignored at the time.
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The problem with the S visa is that only a few are issued every year, while there are many more mid-level informants in third-world governments eager not only to be paid, but eventually to be given sanctuary in the USA.
This is only anecdotal, but I heard back in the 1990s that CIA case officers routinely helped people like Nur — the small fish, who were helpful but had too many marks against them for a legitimate visa — to slip in through falsified paperwork and even completely phony IDs.
If so, Nur was probably told to keep quiet in America and not get on any law enforcement radar. His daughters may not have been told this or were too foolish to understand it.
We can also count on the CIA to erase its files and any connection to the agency when embarrassment or culpability might arise. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are now no records at all for Nur and his whole family, and how they got into this country. If so, that would be a pretty good indication that the CIA or another government agency clandestinely helped them here. But in the subsequent deportation hearing, which Ms. Omar is looking at, that’s going to make for a very speedy trial and removal.
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Image: Ilhan Omar. Credit: Leopaltik1242 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.