by WorldTribune Staff, October 15, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
After Rep. Ilhan Omar was first elected to Congress in 2018, her staff worked to get her birth year changed from 1981 to 1982 on the Minnesota Democrat’s public records, according to reports.
The switch is seen as huge in the ongoing investigation into Omar’s immigration status that has spurred accusations that she misrepresented her age to secure U.S. citizenship.
Rep. Ilhan Omar / C-SPAN
“The alteration could offer a big clue as to what federal immigration agents were searching for when they raided her DC home Monday: If the congresswoman is actually one year older than she’s claimed to be, that would mean she couldn’t have legally become a U.S. citizen in 2000, critics contend,” the New York Post reported on Wednesday.
If she lied about her birthdate on any official form — a passport renewal or bank loan application, for example — Omar could be prosecuted. Naturalization fraud has a 10-year statute of limitations.
The Post cited individuals familiar with the multi-year, federal criminal investigation into Omar as saying that she’s being looked at for making false statements on immigration forms.
For the entire time she served in the Minnesota legislature and for several months into her congressional term, Omar’s birthdate had been listed in the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library as Oct. 4, 1981, as well as on reference sites such as Wikipedia and in media outlets like the BBC.
“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.”
It was a Democrat primary opponent of Omar’s in 2022 who first brought up her immigration status.
The Post reported that AJ Kern, who came in a distant fourth against Omar in the 2022 House Democratic primary for Minnesota’s Fifth District, said in a phone call Tuesday that “she claims her citizenship narrative is that she derived citizenship through her father when she was a 17-year-old minor.”
“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,” claimed Kern, who later filed a FEC complaint to demand proof of citizenship.
The complaint went nowhere because a judge found it was “the job of Congress to vet their members,” Kern said.
Asked what Homeland Security Investigations agents may have been looking for, Kern suggested, “her citizenship papers, her father’s naturalization record.”
