On the menu today: It’s a simple question with far-reaching consequences and a surprisingly murky answer, but when was Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar born?
Omar’s Background Check
In March 2019, if you checked the website of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, the webpage for biographical information for Ilhan Omar listed her birthday as October 4, 1981. Omar was elected to the Minnesota state house in 2016 and ran for the U.S. House of Representatives two years later. Even today, the website for the Library of Congress lists Omar’s birth year as 1981.
After the 2018 election, the Pakistani news site Dawn wrote, “Ilhan, 37, was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 4, 1981.” Also in March 2019, the BBC wrote a profile on Omar, stating, “Ms. Omar was born the youngest of seven siblings in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu in 1981.”
Omar came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1995. In a 2018 podcast interview with Mehdi Hasan, Omar described how she became a U.S. citizen.
Hasan: When did you end up becoming a citizen? How old were you when you became a citizen?
Ilhan Omar: Yeah, so I became a citizen actually before I turned 18. My father became a citizen and so I got my citizenship through that process.
Omar has said that her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was naturalized in the year 2000. (More on that point below.)
If, as that Minnesota Legislative Reference Library page and the Library of Congress indicated, Omar was born in 1981, then she would have turned 18 on October 4, 1999. If Omar was 18 or older in the year 2000, she would not have been eligible for the automatic citizenship under her father’s naturalization under U.S. immigration law; adult children of legal immigrants are required to go through a separate process.
If you go to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library page for Omar today, it lists her birthday as October 4, 1982. Snopes reached out to the library for an explanation:
In an emailed statement to Snopes, David Schmidtke, deputy director of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, confirmed that “congressional staff contacted the library regarding her birthdate.”
“However, we do not have supporting documentation, as the information was ‘self-reported,’” he wrote. “The library does not independently verify birthdates before publishing or updating them.”
We contacted Omar’s office seeking comment on the speculation surrounding her birth year and have not yet received a response. We will update this story if we do.
What Snopes did not mention was the timing of the request to change the birth date, which the New York Post determined:
“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.
Back in 2019, former congressional candidate A. J. Kern started asking questions about whether candidates for office in Minnesota ever have their citizenship verified by the state. She posted a video questioning Omar’s citizenship in October of that year, but we do not know when Kern started asking questions about Omar’s citizenship and birth date. Had word of Kern’s inquiries gotten to Omar, it might have prompted the representative or her staff to call up the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library and request the change.
Typographical errors and fat-finger mistakes happen. But the question, “What year were you born?” is not exactly complicated algebra. Omar’s birthdate had been listed as 1981 on the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library page and Wikipedia, and appeared in news reports like the BBC for about three and a half years before she or her staff noticed the error and sought its correction. That’s quite a while, isn’t it? (In fact, even after the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library page changed, profiles about Omar like this one in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps wrote, “1981: Born on October 4 in Mogadishu, Somalia.”)
You might say, “Well, just check Omar’s birth certificate.” Apparently, we can’t. Back in 2018, the Associated Press reported, “Omar’s campaign has said she and others can’t get birth certificates because the infrastructure in Somalia collapsed during a civil war that displaced over 2 million Somalis.”
There’s one other wrinkle, reported by the New York Post earlier this month:
Ilhan Omar’s dad, Nur Omar Mohamed, has no official record of being a naturalized US citizen, according to documents obtained by a Minnesota activist in 2023 — undermining Omar’s legal claim to citizenship by way of family relations.
The documents show that a US Citizenship and Immigration Services information officer conducted a “diligent search” but found “no record” relating to Nur Omar Mohamed or other variants of his name such as Nur Said Elmi Mohamed.
AJ Kern, who ran against Omar in a 2022 Democratic primary, had requested information about the father’s citizenship status during her run for Congress but only received an answer back in September 2023. . . .
State and federal forms to run for Congress rely on candidates attesting to their citizenship status under penalty of perjury, and Omar has repeatedly stated that she is a US citizen.
A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “certificate of nonexistence of record,” dated September 6, 2023, states “no record is found to exist” for Nur Omar Mohamed or other variants of his name such as Nur Said Elmi Mohamed, born approximately January 1, 1941, in Somalia. The certificate of nonexistence is signed by Douglas Marr, chief of the Information Management Liaison Section. Marr is a real person; there is, so far, no reason to doubt the authenticity of the document sent to Kern.
Now, the claim that no records exist for Nur Omar Mohamed is contradicted by a Washington Post report that said these issues were examined by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services back in 2019, with nothing found that warranted further scrutiny:
The 2019 review of Omar also looked at other issues, some of which are being examined anew.
For instance, back then, USCIS quickly determined it could not accurately answer questions over Omar’s age because refugees frequently come from countries with little or no birth records, making it hard to determine with any certainty.
“That’s not strange and that’s not a red flag to me,” one of the former officials said. “It’s just very, very common that there aren’t great birth records.”
The agency also examined Omar’s father’s immigration file but did not find any issues, according to the former official.
Nur Omar Mohamed died from complications from Covid-19 in June 2020. Sahan Journal, a Minnesota news site, wrote that he was “an esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army” and “loved by everyone.” That is . . . disputed. The Sahan Journal obituary quotes one of his longtime friends, “Yusuf Ismail Faraton, also a former Somali colonel and currently a delivery driver for U.S. Bank”:
He joined the Somali National Army after obtaining a military education in Russia, Faraton said. Thousands of Somali students in that decade received scholarships from the Soviet Union to train as medical doctors, technicians and military specialists.
When he returned to Somalia, Nur began his climb in the military hierarchy, eventually becoming a colonel. During the 1977-1978 Somali-Ethiopian war, he led a regiment, Faraton said. “Nur played a significant role in the war,” he added. “He was one of the officers who were recognized for their work.”
First, when Faraton says “Russia,” he means “the Soviet Union.” Second, when the article says “the 1977-1978 Somali-Ethiopian war,” it means the Somalian invasion of Ethiopia in support of a Somali-backed insurgency and “in hopes of conquering the Ogaden Desert region,” on behalf of Mohammed Siad Barre, who had seized power in a coup in 1969 and had declared Somalia a socialist republic. The Ogaden War was every bit as bloody as you would expect for Africa in the 1970s.
According to the U.S. government, “The term ‘refugee’ does not include any person who ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Anyway, Nur Omar Mohamed entered the U.S. as a refugee in 1995.
As our Andy McCarthy wrote earlier this month:
Omar has said her establishment of legal status in the United States derived from her father’s status; consequently, if the government is claiming that Omar’s status was fraudulently obtained, it is likely claiming that her father’s paperwork was fraudulent. The government takes the position that, if a person’s immigration status derives from a parent who committed fraud, that person’s status could be illegitimate even if she was a minor and unaware of the fraud. That is, the issue is not whether the person had intent to defraud; it is that the non-American parent lacked a legitimate basis to confer legal immigration status to the non-American child.
But Andy warns the courts may well conclude that the statute of limitations for any prosecution of a crime may have passed:
The fact would remain that Omar and her father came to the United States in 1995, and Omar became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000. That’s over a quarter century ago. The statute of limitations (SOL) for most immigration fraud crimes is five years, although it is ten years for unlawfully procuring naturalization or conspiring to do so. Even if the ten-year SOL applied, any prosecution would be long time-barred at this point. Moreover, the case is further complicated by Nur’s death in 2020: It is too late for the government to take action to strip him of citizenship (assuming there was a legal basis to do so), and he is no longer available to testify; ergo, even if there were a timely case, it would be hard to prosecute or strip citizenship from Ilhan Omar when her father, the main witness, is deceased and his citizenship status, from which hers is derived, was never rescinded.
On Monday, October 12, Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s home as part of a criminal investigation. Fox News reported that the search is tied to a criminal investigation involving Omar’s immigration paperwork. The Wall Street Journal reported the probe aims to build a case to strip her of citizenship and deport her.
ADDENDUM: In this month’s issue of the magazine, a look at what a Democratic House and Senate could bring.