Rep. Ilhan Omar’s staff pressed Minnesota officials to change her birth year from 1981 to 1982 after she won her House seat, a shift that tracks with her claimed path to citizenship and now collides with a federal home search.
Federal agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home Monday under a warrant obtained by the Justice Department, as part of an ongoing investigation that has put fresh weight on old questions about her age and how she became a U.S. citizen.
Breitbart reported that congressional staff for the Minnesota Democrat asked state officials to rewrite her listed birth year months after she took office, according to emails reviewed by the New York Post.
Homeland Security Investigations carried out the search. The Justice Department confirmed the operation was part of an active federal probe but did not publicly spell out its basis.
The Minnesota Legislative Reference Library had listed Omar’s birthday as October 4, 1981 during her time in the state House and in the early months of her congressional term. That entry, the library director later explained, had not been backed by documentation.
On May 17, 2019, library staff heard from Omar’s congressional office. The message was blunt: the birth year was wrong, and it needed to read 1982.
The library director put the request in writing a week later.
In a May 24, 2019 email, the director stated:
“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 same email said the office was also working other public records.
“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,”
As of that day, the director added, those two sites still had not been updated:
“As of today, the birth year has not been corrected on the two sites I mentioned.”
The request came several months after Omar entered Congress. It followed a political opponent’s video that questioned her age.
Omar has long said she became a U.S. citizen in 2000 through her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, after the family arrived from Somalia in 1995. In a September 2018 interview with the Intercept, she described the timing this way:
“I became a citizen actually before I turned 18,” “My father became a citizen and so I got my citizenship through that process.”
That claim depends on her still being a minor when the citizenship came through. Federal guidance covering claims tied to events before February 27, 2001, looks to the law then in effect. Rules for deriving citizenship through a parent included age limits and other conditions. Proving it would require the relevant family and immigration records.
The calendar math is simple. Someone born October 4, 1981, turned 18 in October 1999. Someone born October 4, 1982, stayed 17 until October 2000. A 1982 birth year keeps her under 18 deeper into the year she says she naturalized through her father. A 1981 birth year does not.
That is why a one-year change on a state library listing is not a clerical trifle. It sits on the hinge of her own citizenship story.
AJ Kern, who lost to Omar in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District Democratic primary in 2022, has pressed the age and naturalization questions for years. She previously filed a complaint seeking proof of citizenship. A judge held that vetting members of Congress was Congress’s job, and the complaint did not advance.
On Tuesday, Kern told the Post she still rejects Omar’s account.
“She claims her citizenship narrative is that she derived citizenship through her father when she was a 17-year-old minor,”
Kern went further:
“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 said investigators may have been looking for citizenship papers and the father’s naturalization record. That is her assessment, not an official inventory of the warrant.
Reuters, citing a person familiar with the investigation, reported that the federal inquiry concerns alleged immigration fraud and includes paperwork Omar’s late father completed when she was a child. Omar has repeatedly denied immigration fraud allegations.
The Justice Department has not publicly detailed what the warrant covered or what agents sought at the D.C. home. The search itself is not in dispute. The public basis remains thin by design, “ongoing,” without a full charging narrative released.
Omar answered on X the same day as the search. She cast the raid as politics, not evidence.
“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,”
Her statement names President Donald Trump as the driver. It does not address the 2019 staff request to change the birth year, the library’s lack of original documentation, or the age cutoffs built into derivative citizenship.
What is on the record is narrow and hard. After Omar reached Congress, her own staff told a Minnesota library the 1981 birth year was wrong and asked for 1982. They said they were lining up Wikipedia and the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress to match. The library’s prior listing had no supporting documents behind it. Omar’s public citizenship story requires her to have still been a minor in 2000. The one-year swing decides that point on the calendar.
Whether the library ultimately changed its file, and on what proof, is not settled in the available reporting. Whether Wikipedia and the congressional biography directory were fixed, and when, is likewise unclear. The warrant’s exact scope has not been released. Primary naturalization files that would lock down the father’s date and her age at the time have not been laid out in public.
Those gaps do not erase the emails. They do not erase the age math. And they do not erase a federal search conducted by Homeland Security Investigations under a Justice Department warrant while those same citizenship questions sit back in the news.
Voters can live with tough politics. They should not have to guess a member of Congress’s birth year because staff fixed the roster after Election Day.
When the paperwork only lines up after the oath of office, accountability is not a smear, it is the bare minimum.
