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I don't think she married her brother. But her domestic situation was, shall we say, flexible enough to raise some eyebrows. I think it's entirely possible she did an immigration scam marriage for a clan member/related to family guy who wanted to leave the UK for the US and couldn't get in legally/didn't want to wait and go through the long, boring process of application normally.
Just tribal things. She's a legal citizen, she hasn't a civil legal marriage, here's someone from the family/otherwise plugged in to the favour network who needs help, why not? She's already relying heavily on cultural backing and support to be voted into office, now suddenly she is going to get religion and go "oh no I cannot go along with the expectations of my culture, I must adhere to the law of the foreigners"?
The Irish in the US have done enough "oops I mistakenly over stayed my tourist visa - for thirty years" fudging of immigration law that I'm not saying "ethnicity X is all like this", but we're also clannish and favour network enough for me to recognise the pattern.
I feel like there's enough evidence with Elmi that something weird was going on with that marriage. If he's not actually her brother, do you think it was a genuine marriage or some sort of structure chiefly aimed at getting Elmi (even if he isn't her brother) considering she continued to reproduce and file taxes with her original husband during the marriage?
The current economic moment in terms of benefits, being reasonably easy to get to the West and how hard it is to actually be a net contributor to the USA's finances means it's not unreasonable to just have less tolerance of fucking around with immigration that historically
It's possible that he was a half-brother or something, her mother died when she was two so Dad could have remarried (even if only in a religious ceremony like she did) or had a lover and had a kid by that second woman. I'm not going to insist that Elmi is her half-sibling, he could be a cousin, he could be a member of the extended family or a scion of another family that her family owed a favour, etc.
The whole "we were religiously but not civilly legally married, we religiously divorced, I married this guy civilly legally by the American laws, we then religiously divorced and I got back with my first religious-but-not-legal husband and only years later civilly legally divorced Husband Number Two (and now I am on Husband Number Three)" is so suspicious that I have little problems believing Number Two was immigration scamming and this was how her family paid off the favour owed to his family to get him into the country legally. I also have little problem believing she does not give a wet fart about American laws and will do whatever she damn well feels like doing so long as it benefits her, including cry racism and sexism etc.
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