Ilhan Omar steered millions to Minneapolis clinic run by her sister, then denied family financial ties

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) reportedly used her political offices to funnel millions of dollars in public money to a Minneapolis health clinic operated by her elder sister, Sahra Noor, while publicly insisting that "neither I nor my immediate family has any financial interest in this project."

The trail runs through state budget earmarks, federal appropriations, an HHS drug pricing program, a Kenyan consultancy, a Somali telehealth startup, and a web of family connections that circle back to Omar's alleged brother-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. Taken individually, any one thread might be unremarkable. Taken together, they form a pattern that raises serious questions about self-dealing at the intersection of family and public office.

The Clinic and the Cash

People's Center Clinics & Services operates in Minneapolis's Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. According to her LinkedIn profile, Sahra Noor served as its CEO from July 2014 to April 2018. Omar began her first term in the Minnesota House of Representatives in January 2017.

The overlap matters. The 2017 capital budget approved by the state legislature included $2.2 million for the clinic, money Omar boasted about securing. Later, as a member of the U.S. House, she secured another $1 million for clinic renovations. In April 2024, People's Center itself credited Omar for obtaining that $1 million in congressionally directed funding, as Breitbart reports.

So a sitting legislator directed at least $3.2 million in public funds to an organization her sister ran. Then she told the public her family had no financial interest in the project.

In April 2022, Omar stated plainly:

"Neither I nor my immediate family has any financial interest in this project."

Her sister was the CEO. The definition of "financial interest" is doing heavy lifting in that sentence.

$33 Million in HHS Grants and a Phantom Pharmacy

People's Center has received $33 million in Health and Human Services grants since 2002. Among its contractual arrangements was an active contract pharmacy agreement under HHS's 340B Drug Pricing Program with "Degdeg's Carepoint Pharmacy," signed by Noor herself in 2015.

That pharmacy lost its license in 2017. Google Maps lists it as permanently closed. Yet the agreement is described as "active." How an HHS contract pharmacy agreement remains active with a pharmacy that no longer exists is a question nobody in Omar's orbit has answered.

The 340B program is designed to help safety-net providers stretch scarce federal dollars by purchasing outpatient drugs at discounted prices. It is also one of the most fraud-prone programs in federal health care. A contract pharmacy agreement with a shuttered business is not a minor paperwork oversight. It is exactly the kind of arrangement that invites scrutiny.

From Minneapolis to Mogadishu

After leaving People's Center, Noor moved back to Africa. She launched a healthcare consultancy called Grit Partners in Kenya, which claimed to have facilitated "peer learning session" projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. In 2020, she 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."

Hello! Caafi's last Facebook post appeared in 2022. For a company helping millions, it went quiet fast.

Noor's husband, Mohamed Keynan, held multiple positions within Minnesota state and local governments before moving back to Africa to serve as chief of staff to then-Somali Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khayre and as a policy advisor to then-President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, commonly known as Farmaajo. The family's footprint stretches from Minneapolis city planning offices to the highest levels of Somali government, with American taxpayer-funded programs at every stop along the way.

The Brother-Husband Question That Won't Go Away

Then there is Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.

Elmi, a Somali-born British citizen, has long been theorized to be Omar's brother, who legally married her in 2009 in order to move to the United States. Omar married Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi in a religious ceremony and had three children with him, but was living with Hirsi while still legally married to Elmi.

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.

Investigative journalist David Steinberg complicated that narrative in 2019 with a discovery in the source code of Noor's Grit Partners website. According to Steinberg, the code revealed that Elmi was logged into his personal Instagram account, @ahmedelmi, while creating a link to Grit Partners' Instagram page. A man Omar claimed she could not find was apparently building her sister's company website.

As Alpha News reported:

"The ties between Omar's supposedly long-lost ex-husband and Omar's sister appear to contradict Omar's sworn testimony and add to the body of evidence that the ex-husband may be her brother, making all three siblings."

Omar swore she had no contact with Elmi. Elmi's digital fingerprints turned up on her sister's business website. Elmi's LinkedIn profile lists him as a freelance creator of "content, communications strategies and editorial for nonprofits, start-ups and global brands" since 2014. If he was a stranger Omar could not locate, he was a remarkably well-connected one.

The Pattern Is the Point

What emerges from these connections is not a single smoking gun. It is something more familiar and arguably more damaging: a network of family members circulating through public institutions, government contracts, and taxpayer-funded programs with a sitting congresswoman at the center, directing money toward the operation.

Consider the full picture:

• Omar directs $3.2 million in public funds to a clinic her sister ran as CEO.
• Her sister signs an HHS contract pharmacy agreement with a pharmacy that subsequently loses its license and closes, yet the agreement persists.
• Her sister launches international ventures claiming USAID funding and connections to Somali healthcare infrastructure.
• Her sister's husband holds senior roles in both Minnesota government and the Somali government.
• Her alleged brother-husband, whom she swore under oath she could not find, appears in the source code of her sister's company website.
• Omar publicly denies any family financial interest in the projects she funded.

Each item has an innocent explanation available. All of them together require a level of coincidence that strains credulity.

Silence as Strategy

The renovations Omar helped fund were completed in 2022 and celebrated with a lineup of Minnesota Democratic officials, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and state Sen. Omar Fateh. None of them appear to have raised questions about the family relationship between the congresswoman who secured the money and the woman who ran the clinic that spent it.

That is how these arrangements survive. Not through secrecy, but through a political ecosystem where nobody with power has an incentive to ask uncomfortable questions. The officials who showed up to cut the ribbon benefited from the same constituency Omar serves. The media that might investigate shares a city with Omar's allies. The institutions that disbursed the money operate on paperwork, not curiosity.

If a Republican member of Congress had steered $3.2 million to a clinic run by a sibling, sworn in court she could not locate an ex-spouse whose digital footprint turned up on that sibling's company website, and then flatly denied any family financial interest in the project, the coverage would be wall-to-wall. The calls for ethics investigations would be deafening.

For Omar, the silence holds. That silence is not exoneration. It is protection.