Rep. Ilhan Omar’s staff helped get her birthdate changed in public records once the Minnesota Democrat was elected to Congress in 2018, a switch that has since spurred frenzied accusations that she misrepresented her age to secure US citizenship.
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 US citizen in 2000, critics contend.
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, for the entire time she served in the state House and for several months into her congressional term.
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But the congresswoman’s staff moved to shift the date forward by one year in May 2019 after a video from a political opponent went viral that claimed Omar was fibbing about her age, according to emails reviewed by The Post.
“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,” wrote the director of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library in an email just days after the change was made.
“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 today, the birth year has not been corrected on the two sites I mentioned,” the director added in the May 24, 2019 email.
The legislative reference library director, who did not respond to a request for comment, said in another email that the initial 1981 birth year had been put down because it was “widely available—in Wikipedia and the Biographical Directory–and so we added that birthdate without documentation.”
Reps for the congresswoman’s office and Omar herself have repeatedly denied allegations of immigration fraud.
“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,” Omar said in a Monday statement on X.
The Minnesota pol has long claimed that she received what’s known as derivative citizenship through her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, who she said became a naturalized citizen in 2000, five years after coming into the country from war-torn Somalia.
“I became a citizen actually before I turned 18,” she 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 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.”
