Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) reportedly used her political offices to secure millions of dollars in public funding for a Minneapolis health clinic operated by her sister, a pattern of directed spending that spans her time in both the Minnesota state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives.
The clinic in question is People's Center Clinics & Services, located in Minneapolis's Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Omar's elder sister, Sahra Noor, served as its CEO from July 2014 to April 2018, according to her LinkedIn profile. During that overlap, Omar was elected to the Minnesota House in January 2017, and the state legislature's 2017 capital budget included $2.2 million for the clinic.
Omar boasted about getting the money. She celebrated the renovations it funded in 2022, appearing alongside Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and state Sen. Omar Fateh (D-MN). Later, as a member of the U.S. House, Omar secured another $1 million for clinic renovations. In April 2024, the People's Center credited Omar with securing $1 million in congressionally directed funding, Breitbart News reported.
When scrutiny arrived, Omar offered a single line of defense. In April 2022, she stated: "Neither I nor my immediate family has any financial interest in this project."
That claim deserves more weight placed on it than Omar seems willing to bear.
People's Center has received $33 million in Health and Human Services grants since 2002. That is a significant pipeline of federal money flowing into a single clinic. Under Noor's leadership, the clinic signed a contract pharmacy agreement in 2015 for HHS's 340B Drug Pricing Program with an entity called Degdeg's Carepoint Pharmacy. That pharmacy lost its license in 2017.
The timeline matters. Noor was running the clinic. Omar entered office. Public dollars started flowing to the clinic from the state budget Omar helped shape. Omar then moved to Congress, and more federal dollars followed. Omar insists there is no financial interest. But "financial interest" is not the only kind of interest that matters in public corruption questions. Political patronage, family loyalty, and reputation laundering are interests, too.
Noor left her CEO position and moved back to Africa, running her own healthcare consultancy called Grit Partners in Kenya. She claimed Grit Partners facilitated "peer learning session" projects funded by USAID. In 2020, Noor co-founded a telehealth startup called Hello! Caafi, which claimed to be "helping millions in Somalia gain access to essential health services in their local communities." The company's last Facebook post was made in 2022. Where those calls were actually being connected to remains, according to reporting, remains completely unclear.
Noor's husband, Mohamed Keynan, held multiple positions within Minnesota state and local governments before also relocating to Africa. His LinkedIn page lists roles as a management analyst in the Minnesota Department of Human Services, a city planning commissioner in the Twin Cities suburb of Roseville, and a contracts manager for Hennepin County.
Keynan then surfaced as chief of staff to then-Somali Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khayre and policy advisor to then-President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, commonly known as Farmaajo.
So Omar's sister ran a clinic that received millions in taxpayer funds, and Omar helped direct. That sister's husband held government jobs in Minnesota, then moved into senior roles in the Somali government. And all of this orbits around a single congresswoman who represents Cedar-Riverside and has spent years insisting none of it is connected.
Then there is Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a Somali-born British citizen. It has long been theorized that Elmi is Omar's brother, who legally married her in 2009 to facilitate his move to the United States. During the same period, Omar was living with Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, whom she married in a religious ceremony and had three children with.
In 2017, Omar swore under oath in a divorce filing that she had not seen Elmi in six years and had no way to locate or contact him. That sworn statement becomes harder to accept in light of what investigative journalist David Steinberg discovered in 2019. Steinberg found, in the source code of Noor's Grit Partners website, evidence that Elmi had logged into his personal Instagram account while creating the link to Grit Partners' Instagram account. He screenshotted the finding and shared it on social media.
Elmi's LinkedIn page says he has worked as a freelance creator of "content, communications strategies, and editorial for nonprofits, start-ups, and global brands" since 2014. A man Omar swore she could not find was apparently doing digital work for her sister's company.
Not one major media outlet pressed the contradiction. Not one congressional ethics inquiry gained traction. Not one Democratic colleague called for transparency.
The pattern here is not complicated:
In any other context, with any other member of Congress, this constellation of facts would trigger subpoenas. Reporters would camp outside the clinic. Ethics investigations would already be underway. But Omar has benefited from a media environment that treats scrutiny of her as inherently suspect, where asking questions about verifiable public records gets reframed as bigotry.
That framing is a shield, not an argument. Millions in taxpayer dollars flowed to a clinic run by a congresswoman's sister. The congresswoman took public credit for directing that money. Her family members moved between Minnesota government roles, Somali government roles, and African business ventures with murky funding sources. A man she claimed under oath to have lost all contact with was building her sister's web presence.
These are not conspiracy theories. They are public records, LinkedIn profiles, and website source code. The facts do not require embellishment. They require investigation.
The only question is whether anyone with subpoena power has the nerve to start one.