If you are not a member of the Democrats' protected class of bitter loudmouths who hate America, you can be investigated and prosecuted for marriage fraud. The headlines have been filled with recent crackdowns.
In Texas last week, 96 people were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to defraud our immigration system by arranging phony unions between American citizens and sham spouses in Vietnam.
In Bridgeport, Connecticut, three men pleaded guilty to participating in fraudulent marriages with noncitizens and sponsoring them for green cards under false pretenses.
At Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month, two soldiers and two African immigrants were indicted by a grand jury related to a scheme involving an entire ring of service members who attempted to match female soldiers with foreigners from Ghana and Nigeria. They each face between 15-35 years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines each.
In Alabama, an Indian national pleaded guilty to arranging 80 fake marriages using U.S. citizen recruits to bail out Indian foreign nationals who had overstayed their visas or Student Exchange Visitor Program requirements.
You wouldn't know it from the radio silence of Democratic leaders regarding radioactive Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar's long-festering and bizarre bigamy scheme (which she still refuses to address), but marriage fraud is a federal felony. As the Department of Homeland Security makes clear, it is a serious crime -- not a victimless, harmless infraction -- that "weakens our nation's security and makes us less safe."
No kidding. I have long documented the national security consequences of marriage fraud by deadly jihadists:
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Eight Mideastern men who plotted to bomb New York landmarks in 1993 all obtained green cards and permanent legal residence by marrying U.S. citizens.
El Sayyid A. Nosair put a ring on American Karen Ann Mills Sweeney's finger to avoid deportation for overstaying his visa. He acquired U.S. citizenship, allowing him to remain in the country, and was later convicted for conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that claimed six lives.
Top Osama bin Laden aide Ali Mohamed became a U.S. citizen after marrying a woman he met on a plane trip from Egypt to New York. He was convicted for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa that killed 12 Americans and more than 200 others.
A year after 9/11, Homeland Security officials cracked a vast Middle Eastern marriage-fraud ring for illegal immigrants in "Operation Broken Vows" that stretched from Boston to South Carolina to California.
Faisal Shahzad, the 2010 Times Square bomb plotter, married an American woman, Huma Mian, in 2008 after spending a decade in the country on foreign student and employment visas.
Anyone capable of and willing to lie to federal officials in face-to-face interviews, falsify government forms under penalty of perjury, and conspire to undermine the integrity of our immigration system is a threat to our country. Terrorism is not the only concern. Other complex criminal organizations are often involved. Even nations governed by open borders loons like Canada's Justin Trudeau take marriage fraud seriously. Last week, the government moved to strip a Chinese national of his fraudulently acquired Canadian citizenship after paying a woman $5,000 to enter a sham marriage.
We have enough native-born scam artists and fraudsters without having to import more from around the world. But you know what's even more of an insult than an ordinary foreign marriage faker? An entitled, arrogant and unrepentant marriage faker hiding behind the "Islamophobia" and "sexism" cards. Yes, I'm looking at you, Omar.
Investigations dating back to 2016 by blogger Scott Johnson of Power Line (which recently celebrated 15 years in the blogosphere), David North of the Center for Immigration Studies, Alpha News reporter Preya Samsundar and PJMedia.com reporter David Steinberg have determined that the outspoken Somalian Muslim refugee likely married her own brother named Ahmed Elmi in 2009 for some unknown ill-gotten gain while still informally married to the man she calls her husband and father of her three children, Ahmed Hirsi. After a Somalian website floated questions about the marriage arrangement with Elmi and Johnson's initial reporting broke into the local news, Omar sought to divorce Elmi. Her use of $6,000 in state campaign funds, some of which went to pay a personal divorce lawyer, is currently under state investigation.
Social media posts, photographic evidence and publicly available biographical data strongly suggest that Elmi (now living in London) and Omar are siblings with the same father. Many of the pair's Instagram and Facebook comments to each other have been deleted. Omar's staff and lawyer have rebuked questions about the arrangement as "categorically ridiculous and false" and suggested that truth-seekers in the matter are "people who do not want an East African, Muslim woman elected to office." For good measure, Omar has decried "Trump-style misogyny, racism, anti-immigration rhetoric and Islamophobic division."
Hey, I'm not the one who bragged last week that Omar, a naturalized American citizen, brought "the perspective of a foreigner" to her role on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. That was Rep. Omar. Perhaps she'll share her "foreign perspective" on how any other sane nation would handle an elected official who won't answer questions about possible felony immigration fraud while sitting on a sensitive legislative panel. I'm all ears.
Michelle Malkin's email address is writemalkin@gmail.com.
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