Omar’s Office Had Her Official Birth Year Changed in 2019. Now Investigators Are Looking at Her Citizenship.

Federal investigators looking into Rep. Ilhan Omar’s immigration history are most likely focused on how she became a U.S. citizen as a teenager, and on paperwork filed by her late father, according to current and former immigration officials who spoke to the New York Post. Their reporting, published September 16, puts a fresh spotlight on a 2019 episode that no public birth record has ever settled: her office’s request to change her official birth year from 1981 to 1982, which critics say came days after a viral video argued she was too old to have received citizenship the way she says she did.

Omar, a Minnesota Democrat born in Somalia, says she became a citizen in 2000 through her father’s naturalization, a path open only to minor children. The year she was born decides whether that story holds.

The birth-year change

The Minnesota Legislative Reference Library previously listed Omar’s birth year as 1981; an archived version of the library’s page from March 30, 2019, still shows it. In 2019, a social media video argued that Omar was 18 or 19, not 17, when she said she became a citizen in 2000.

On May 17, 2019, Omar’s staff contacted the library and asked that her birth year be changed to 1982, according to emails reviewed by Alpha News. Former Minnesota congressional candidate AJ Kern, who first raised the issue, says the request came just two days after the video was published. The emails also showed staff working with the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress to make the same change there.

The library’s own page confirms the outcome. It now lists her date of birth as October 4, 1982, with this note: “Her birth year is correct. It is incorrectly reported as 1981 in other sources.” It adds that as of May 24, 2019, “Rep. Omar’s congressional staff are working with Wikipedia and the U.S. House” to correct the year elsewhere. Congressional records today list October 1982, which would have made her 17 in 2000.

Omar has never publicly produced a birth certificate, saying her documents were lost in the chaos of Somalia’s civil war. So the official record changed because Omar’s office said so, and the public has never been shown the document that would settle it.

What investigators are reportedly examining

The Trump administration has made clear the matter is under review. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on a podcast that “something’s going to happen” as investigators look into the family’s migration history. On September 13, border czar Tom Homan told Fox News that “I know things are going on, but I can’t give specifics of what’s happening,” and, asked whether he was confirming an investigation, said, “I’m confirming that ICE is, yeah.”

According to The Post’s sources, the most serious exposure for Omar is not her marriages but her naturalization file. “If there’s enough evidence that she or [her father] lied on her immigration application to become a United States citizen, whether it was one time or several times, the Trump administration could initiate a denaturalization process that would strip her of her citizenship,” a top immigration official told the paper.

The sources pointed to several possible pressure points:

• Her age in 2000. If she was older than 17 when the family naturalized, her claim to derivative citizenship would collapse.
• Her father’s paperwork. Nur Said Mohamed Elmi was long described as an educator. After his death in 2020, Somali-language reports identified him as a Somali National Army colonel. An immigration lawyer told The Post that if he misrepresented his role under the Siad Barre regime and Omar knowingly backed the account, her citizenship could be at risk.
• The two-parent rule. Because Omar was born before 1983, the lawyer said, an older law generally required both parents to be naturalized unless one had died. Omar has said her mother died when she was two.

The marriage question

The Post also addressed the long-running allegation, which originated within Minnesota’s Somali community and on conservative blogs, that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the British national Omar legally married in 2009, is her brother. Omar has denied it. In 2016 she called the rumors “absolutely false and ridiculous.” No public document has proven the claim. A 2019 New York Times fact check noted a 2018 Minneapolis Star Tribune report that the images Omar showed of her family’s 1995 U.S. entry documents did not list Elmi.

Either way, a former ICE lawyer told The Post the marriage is a legal dead end. Marriage fraud carries up to five years in prison, but the lawyer said the five-year statute of limitations has expired since the couple’s 2017 divorce, and a U.S. citizen cannot be deported for a sham marriage. A former executive-level federal official said “a DNA test would absolutely resolve the question one way or another,” while acknowledging Elmi has no legal obligation to cooperate from abroad, and predicted: “The request will be made for DNA testing and it will be refused loudly and publicly.”

Omar and Elmi did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.

Why it matters

Nobody is entitled to a conviction by rumor, and Omar has not been charged with anything. But she is also not entitled to have Americans take on faith a citizenship story that depends on one year, and on a correction her own office requested when that year came under scrutiny. If her account is true, the documents exist somewhere, in her father’s naturalization file if nowhere else. Investigators examining that file are doing what should have been done long before she took an oath to the Constitution.

Ilhan Omar’s office had the official record changed just as her birth year became a question, and now she may have to defend that change to people who can subpoena the file.

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