Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) congressional office asked Minnesota officials to change her listed birth year from 1981 to 1982 in May 2019, months after she was sworn into Congress, according to emails reviewed by the New York Post.
The request came after a political opponent released a video questioning Omar’s age. It is now getting fresh scrutiny because federal agents searched Omar’s Washington, DC, home Monday as part of an ongoing investigation.
For years, the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library’s biography of Omar listed her birthday as October 4, 1981. That date stuck through her time in the Minnesota House and into the early months of her first congressional term.
A May 24, 2019 email from the library’s director lays out how the change happened: “On May 17, 2019, Library staff were informed by Rep. Omar’s congressional staff that her birth year was incorrect and requested that we change it to 1982.”
The push wasn’t limited to the state library. “Rep. Omar’s congressional staff are working with Wikipedia and with the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and other sources to correct her birth year on those sites,” the director wrote, adding that as of that date the correction hadn’t yet gone through on either site.
The director also noted the original 1981 date had never been backed up with documentation.
Why the year matters
Omar has said she became a U.S. citizen in 2000 through her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, after the family came to the United States from Somalia in 1995. “I became a citizen actually before I turned 18,” she told the Intercept in September 2018. “My father became a citizen and so I got my citizenship through that process.”
The one-year swing in her birth date isn’t trivial to that story. Born October 4, 1981, she would have turned 18 in October 1999. Born October 4, 1982, she would have stayed 17 until October 2000 — the difference between being a minor or an adult when citizenship through a parent would have applied.
Federal guidance holds that citizenship claims tied to events before February 27, 2001 are judged under the law in effect at the time, which included age conditions for deriving citizenship through a parent. Confirming eligibility would require the underlying family and immigration records.
A challenger’s allegations
AJ Kern, who ran against Omar in Minnesota’s Fifth District Democratic primary in 2022, told the Post Tuesday she has doubts about both Omar’s age and the claim that her father naturalized in time.
“She claims her citizenship narrative is that she derived citizenship through her father when she was a 17-year-old minor,” Kern said. “For derivative citizenship, two things have to be true — one, her father had to naturalize; and two, she still had to be a minor — and what I have found is that it’s highly likely that neither of those things are true.”
Kern’s claims don’t prove Omar obtained citizenship improperly, and the emails on their own don’t show she submitted a false birthdate on any citizenship paperwork. Kern said she once filed a complaint seeking proof of Omar’s citizenship, but a judge ruled that vetting members of Congress is Congress’s job, not the courts’, and the case went nowhere.
Asked what investigators might be after in Monday’s search, Kern pointed to Omar’s citizenship documents and her father’s naturalization record — her own guess, not a confirmed description of the warrant.
The search and the response
Homeland Security Investigations carried out Monday’s search under a warrant obtained by the Justice Department, which confirmed the operation was tied to an ongoing federal investigation without laying out its basis publicly. Reuters separately reported, citing a person familiar with the probe, that it concerns alleged immigration fraud involving paperwork Omar’s late father filled out when she was a child.
Omar has repeatedly denied any immigration fraud. In a statement posted Monday, she cast the search as political retaliation from President Donald Trump: “I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.”
