Questions arise over Rep. Ilhan Omar's U.S. citizenship status

Allegations surrounding Rep. Ilhan Omar's U.S. citizenship have resurfaced, drawing attention from lawmakers and activists alike.

This week, Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican, requested the House Oversight Committee to subpoena Omar’s immigration records to investigate claims about her citizenship and personal history.

Critics argue that these lingering questions about Omar, a Somali-born member of Congress representing Minneapolis since her election in 2019, deserve a thorough examination, especially given the constitutional requirements for House members to be U.S. citizens for at least seven years, among other criteria.

Longstanding Allegations Gain New Traction

For years, Omar has faced scrutiny over her personal life, including rumors about her marriage, which she has dismissed as “absurd and offensive," the Daily Mail reported.

More pressing for many are the doubts about her citizenship, with claims that there’s no record of her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, who passed away in 2020 from COVID complications, ever becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Omar maintains she derived citizenship through her father in 2000 when she was 17, a process that requires the parent to be naturalized while the child is still a minor.

Activists and Records Raise Doubts

Conservative activist AJ Kern, a 65-year-old former Minnesota Republican candidate, has been at the forefront of these challenges since 2019, alleging that neither condition for derived citizenship was met in Omar’s case.

Kern, who once covered refugee issues for the St. Cloud Times, claims she found no federal records of naturalization for Omar’s father, a point supported by a letter from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services stating they could not locate him in their database.

“I found out many of them never bother to get citizenship because why bother, and it made me wonder about Omar's whole story,” Kern said, explaining her motivation to dig deeper into the matter.

Additional Claims and Community Concerns

Kern also pointed to discrepancies in Omar’s documented birth year, noting that a Minnesota legislative biography initially listed it as 1981 before it was updated to 1982 shortly after Kern publicized the issue on social media in May 2019.

A letter from the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library confirmed that Omar’s staff requested the change on May 17, 2019, raising questions about whether this was a simple clerical fix or something more calculated.

Beyond citizenship, Kern and others have highlighted broader issues in Minneapolis, including allegations of widespread social services fraud in Minnesota, estimated at $9 billion over a decade, which they argue ties into lax immigration oversight.

Political Pushback and Media Silence

Adding fuel to the fire, Republican gubernatorial candidate Phil Parrish has claimed that Minnesota’s immigration policies have been shaped by flawed activism, allowing discrepancies in records and relationships to go unchecked.

“A lot of this was systematically enabled by a flawed immigration agenda in Minnesota built on political activism,” Parrish asserted, suggesting that Omar’s story is emblematic of larger systemic issues.

Meanwhile, journalist Liz Collin, who left WCCO for Alpha News in 2022 over concerns about editorial bias, has been one of the few to report on Kern’s findings, though she faced death threats and protests at her home for her efforts—a sad commentary on the risks of questioning certain narratives in today’s climate.