Ilhan Omar’s congressional staff pushed Minnesota to change her official birth year months after her 2018 win, even as federal agents and prosecutors now examine her finances and family immigration history.
Emails obtained by the New York Post show aides contacted the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library in May 2019 and asked staff to move Rep. Ilhan Omar’s listed birth year from 1981 to 1982. The request came months after the Minnesota Democrat won her House seat.
The library had carried October 4, 1981, throughout her time in the state House. Wikipedia, the BBC, and other outlets used the same year. Days after the edit, the library director wrote that Omar’s team said the year was wrong and wanted 1982 instead.
That same email said the aides were also lobbying Wikipedia and the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress for the same correction. The timing matters because Omar had already told the public how she became a citizen.
In September 2018, Omar said she became a U.S. citizen “before I turned 18” through her father Nur Omar Mohamed’s naturalization in 2000. Under federal rules, a minor child can gain citizenship when a parent naturalizes.
If the 1981 year held, she would have been 18 or 19 when her father naturalized. Critics have long argued that would close the under-18 path she described. Omar has flatly denied any fraud.
Daily Mail reporting laid out the library emails alongside the newer federal moves, tying the old record fight to fresh investigative pressure.
The birth-year push sat on the books for years. It resurfaced just as Homeland Security agents hit her Washington home and prosecutors widened their look at money and immigration paperwork.
Before dawn on a recent Monday, Homeland Security agents searched Omar’s D.C. residence. Witnesses saw them carry boxes of seized property into government vehicles. Omar called the raid “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”
"an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement."
The search fits a broader federal agents search tied to long-running questions about immigration filings in her family circle. No arrests were reported from the raid itself.
People familiar with a years-long federal criminal probe say investigators are examining whether false statements were made on immigration paperwork. Absolute calendar dates for the raid were not released in the initial accounts, only the weekday reference.
On Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro told Fox News her office is reviewing the congresswoman’s financial disclosures. She kept the description spare.
Pirro put it this way to Fox News:
"We're looking at the facts."
The same day, the New York Times reported that federal prosecutors had served grand jury subpoenas on Omar’s sister Sahra Noor and at least one other relative. The subpoenas focused on family immigration history.
Noor runs a Minneapolis-based consulting firm that says it secured more than $20 million in funding for health initiatives and consulted on projects backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other groups.
President Donald Trump, asked about the search, said he had nothing to do with it and that the matter was “really up to the DOJ,” while calling Omar “totally crooked, personally.” Omar has denied wrongdoing across the board.
Omar’s 2025 financial disclosure first listed assets of between $6 million and $30 million shared with her husband. She later amended the filing to a far smaller range and blamed accounting errors.
Last month a House ethics watchdog recommended dismissing allegations over the filings. Omar’s office pointed to that recommendation in her defense. Pirro’s review continues anyway.
The money questions sit beside older marriage claims. In 2009 Omar married Ahmed Elmi. A Somali community leader later told the Daily Mail the marriage was meant to help Elmi obtain U.S. immigration status. Omar denies Elmi was her brother and denies the marriage was fraudulent.
Legal analysts have sketched how hard it would be to unwind citizenship even if investigators proved problems, a point explored in coverage of the steep legal climb facing any denaturalization effort.
Recent accounts of the investigation say agents are concentrating on Nur Omar Mohamed’s immigration file more than the 2009 marriage alone. That tracking appears in reporting on how the federal probe targets her father's paperwork rather than treating the wedding as the sole theory.
The library episode still supplies the clearest paper trail on the birth year. Aides did not merely dispute a media bio. They went to an official Minnesota state repository months after Omar arrived in Congress and secured a change from 1981 to 1982.
They also pressed private and congressional biographical sources for matching edits. Whether Wikipedia or the Biographical Directory actually moved the date is not settled in the available record. The request itself is documented in the library director’s email.
House Republicans have separately pressed for more immigration files to be made public and have floated stronger remedies. That drumbeat includes calls described in reporting on how Comer pushes to release evidence and put expulsion on the table.
Omar remains a vocal critic of immigration enforcement. She has pushed legislation that would cut large sums from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and send the money elsewhere, including a measure covered when Omar introduces a bill aimed at ICE funding.
The public file still lacks the full text of every email the Post obtained, the precise amended asset range after Omar’s correction, the street-level warrant details, and the identity of the second relative who received a subpoena. Absolute dates for the Monday raid and Tuesday announcements were not fixed beyond the weekday labels.
What is fixed is the sequence. State records carried 1981. Omar claimed pre-18 citizenship via a 2000 naturalization. In May 2019 her congressional staff sought a 1982 birth year in official Minnesota materials and, per the library director, in major biographical listings. Years later, agents removed boxes from her D.C. home, Pirro opened a disclosures review, and a grand jury process reached her sister’s door.
Omar denies fraud at every turn and frames the scrutiny as politics. Prosecutors say they are following facts. The library emails show her own team treated the birth year as a problem that needed fixing after she took federal office.
Voters can read the dates, the citizenship claim, and the staff request side by side. When official records and sworn political narratives diverge, the clean fix is sunlight and sworn answers, not another quiet edit.
