Rep. Ilhan Omar’s staff successfully altered her official birthdate in Minnesota records months after she entered Congress, a change that now sits at the center of a federal criminal investigation into her immigration history.
The Minnesota Legislative Reference Library had listed Omar, 42, with an Oct. 4, 1981 birthdate throughout her state House tenure and into early 2019, according to emails reviewed by The Post. That timeline shifted in May 2019 when her congressional staff contacted the library to push the year forward to 1982, just days after a viral video from a political opponent accused her of lying about her age.
“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 library director wrote in a May 24, 2019 email. The director noted that Omar’s team was simultaneously working to correct Wikipedia and the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, though those sites had not yet been updated.
The original 1981 date had been adopted without documentation because it was “widely available—in Wikipedia and the Biographical Directory–and so we added that birthdate without documentation,” the director explained in a separate email. The director did not respond to a request for comment.
The one-year discrepancy carries significant legal weight. If Omar was born in 1981 rather than 1982, she would have turned 18 before her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, allegedly naturalized in 2000, potentially invalidating her claim to derivative citizenship through him. She has long maintained that she became a citizen before reaching adulthood through her father’s naturalization process.
“I became a citizen actually before I turned 18,” Omar told The Intercept in a September 2018 interview. “My father became a citizen and so I got my citizenship through that process.”
AJ Kern, who finished fourth in the 2022 Democratic primary for Minnesota’s Fifth District, has spent years challenging that narrative. In a phone call Tuesday, Kern outlined the legal requirements she believes Omar failed to meet.
“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 later filed an FEC complaint demanding proof of citizenship, which a judge dismissed on the grounds that vetting members was Congress’s responsibility.
The birthdate alteration has taken on renewed urgency following Monday’s raid on Omar’s Washington, D.C. Home by Homeland Security Investigations agents. People familiar with the multi-year federal probe have indicated investigators are examining whether she made false statements on immigration forms. If she misrepresented her birthdate on official documents such as a passport renewal or bank loan application, she could face prosecution under naturalization fraud statutes, which carry a 10-year limitations period.
Kern speculated that agents were likely seeking “her citizenship papers, her father’s naturalization record.”
President Trump amplified Kern’s allegations in a December 2025 Truth Social post, and administration officials have repeatedly cited Omar as a target of possible immigration fraud inquiries.
Omar has forcefully rejected the accusations, framing the investigation as politically motivated harassment.
“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,” she wrote in a Monday statement on X.
Representatives for Omar’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and her office has repeatedly denied allegations of immigration fraud.