Questions as to what federal agents may have been looking for when they raided Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D) home found a former rival reminding about an official record changed by staffers.
Monday, as Americans of all stripes marked the impact that explorer Christopher Columbus had on the founding of the nation, the home of the Somalia-born congresswoman was raided by DHS agents who set out to make their own sort of discovery.
As reports have suggested, the search was connected to a criminal fraud investigation related to Omar’s immigration status; a digital paper trail raised doubts about her naturalization claim based on staffers setting about changing the year of her birth.
Months after she was first sworn in on Capitol Hill, an exchange with the director of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library in a May 24, 2019 email reviewed by the New York Post recorded how Omar’s staff aimed to change the record of her birth from October 1981 to October 1982.
“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. “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.”
A separate email suggested the 1981 year was recorded without documentation to confirm it; rather, “widely available” biographies were checked, such as Wikipedia.
While Omar and her allies played the victim card and President Donald Trump noted that the investigation into the “terrible” and “totally crooked” congresswoman had “nothing to do with” him, reports began circulating that the raid was related to her immigration status.
Trump calls Omar ‘totally crooked’ after feds raid Somalia-born Dem’s home https://t.co/EtModhII4A via @BIZPACReview
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) October 13, 2026
During a 2018 interview with Mehdi Hasan for The Intercept, Omar reaffirmed her account of becoming a naturalized citizen as the minor daughter of her supposed refugee father, Nur Omar Mohamed, in 2000: “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.”
However, AJ Kern, a 2022 opponent in the Democratic primary for Omar’s district, has long doubted the narrative and even filed a complaint aimed at uncovering the truth.
She told the Post in a phone interview, “For derivative citizenship, two things have to be true — one, her father had to be naturalized; 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.”
A judge rejected a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission seeking proof of Omar’s citizenship, deeming it the responsibility of Congress “to vet their members.” In addition to concerns about the lawmaker’s birth year, Kern told NewsNation that her ongoing effort to suss out the facts on Omar’s citizenship found both DHS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services unable to find a record that the congresswoman’s late father was ever naturalized.
She concluded Homeland Security Investigations agents may have been looking for records of her citizenship and her father’s naturalization.
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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