Ilhan Omar Probe Targets Citizenship and Her Birth Year
The Wall Street Journal reports the goal may be stripping her citizenship, and a Minnesota grand jury has issued more than a dozen subpoenas. Omar rejects the allegations.
A federal investigation into Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whose home in the Washington area was searched on October 12, is aimed at stripping her of U.S. citizenship and deporting her, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, October 14, citing U.S. officials and people familiar with the case. Omar’s office dismissed the investigation as baseless in a statement to the paper. Denaturalization requires a court proceeding, and the paper did not report that a suit has been filed.
We covered the search itself earlier. What is new is what investigators are actually examining and who has received subpoenas.
What are investigators checking in her father’s papers?
According to sources cited by U.S. media, investigators are examining whether Omar or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, deliberately changed her year of birth in immigration documents. The Wall Street Journal reports the dispute is over whether the papers listed her as 17 rather than 18 when her father applied for citizenship in 2000. That would have let her obtain citizenship through him as a minor, without a separate process.
Investigators are also checking whether her father lied about, or left out, details of earlier military service while seeking legal status in the U.S. Mohamed died in 2020, which makes it harder to establish who said what. “Homeland Security Investigations just went through her file from top to bottom,” said an official in the Trump administration, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The inquiry is run by Homeland Security Investigations, which reopened the case this year. The same unit examined a similar suspicion under the Biden administration and dropped it after finding no evidence of fraud.
The search and the subpoenas
Homeland Security agents searched Ilhan Omar’s home under a court warrant. According to a person who saw the document, the warrant lists conspiracy, immigration fraud and false statements as possible offenses. Agents took her passport, mobile phone, personal computers and notebooks, and carried out boxes labeled “Seized Property Evidence.”
According to Al Jazeera and Newsweek, a Minnesota grand jury has issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to some of her relatives. Omar has not been charged with any crime in connection with the investigation.
Omar responded on X:
“Make no mistake: this is an attempt to attack political enemies and to turn federal law enforcement into a weapon.”
She added that Trump has been attacking her for ten years with “baseless lies and smear campaigns.” Hakeem Jeffries and other senior Democrats said in a joint statement on October 12 that the search came less than 30 days before the election.
A second inquiry: the financial disclosure
Separately from the immigration investigation, U.S. Attorney for Washington Jeanine Pirro confirmed to Fox News that her office is reviewing Omar’s financial disclosures. In last year’s filing, the assets of Omar and her husband were reported at $6 million to $30 million. Omar later corrected the figure to $18,000 to $95,000 and explained it as a bookkeeping error. Last month, the congressional oversight body recommended that no violation be found.
Pirro said:
“It doesn’t matter what the House does. We look at the facts, and we will follow them wherever they lead us.”
President Donald Trump wrote on social media on Tuesday: “America wants answers, and we want them NOW!” At a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday he criticized Omar’s Somali background, and a few hours after the search he told reporters he had nothing to do with it and that it was a “matter for the Justice Department.”
How common are denaturalization cases?
The Justice Department has filed at least 163 denaturalization suits since January 2025, 40 of them since August. According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, the average from 1990 to 2017 was about 11 a year. Such cases rarely reach into decades-old conduct, except when tied to war crimes or genocide.
The statute of limitations for criminal denaturalization is ten years, while the civil process has none.
Where does the doubt about her birth year come from?
Omar arrived in the U.S. in 1995 at age 12, after four years in a refugee camp in Kenya, and received citizenship in 2000. The claim that she was 18 when her father filed spread in 2019 through a viral video on conservative networks. Soon afterward, the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library changed her birth year in its records from 1981 to 1982. The library told the Washington Post that Omar’s staff had requested it. Omar describes those requests as correcting errors, not covering anything up.
On November 3, Omar is running for a fifth term in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District.
