Government Response Again Raises Question: Is Ilhan Omar a U.S. Citizen?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jul. 28, 2023) — AJ Kern, a former primary challenger to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN5), has received a letter from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) indicating it cannot locate any naturalization records for Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, who passed away in June 2020, according to the congresswoman.

Omar was born in Somalia and came to the United States as a refugee from Kenya with her father in 1995, according to multiple news sources and Omar herself. People, however, reports an arrival in the U.S. “in the early 2000s, when Omar was 12.”

Omar has claimed she became a U.S. citizen in 2000 at the age of 17 through her father’s alleged newly-acquired U.S. citizenship, which Kern questioned during the 2022 primary campaign since it would have given the family barely five years’ residency in the country, a requirement for applying for U.S. citizenship. In addition, refugees must have obtained “lawful permanent resident status” necessitating a year of residency in the United States prior to being eligible to apply for citizenship.

Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution requires members of the House of Representatives to have been “seven Years a Citizen of the United States.” For U.S. senators, the requirement is “nine Years a Citizen.”

Further, in a May 2022 interview with this publication as well as in a contemporaneous video, Kern pointed out that Omar has provided two different birth dates without explanation: October 4, 1981 and October 4, 1982, with both reflected in various news reports today. In a caption to the video, Kern wrote that the date of “October 4, 1981” posted on Omar’s then-Minnesota House of Representatives website was changed to “October 4, 1982” “just two days after I published this video on social media…”

An archived page from Omar’s state legislative website as captured by the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library as well as an updated page bear out Kern’s claims, which are also supported by confirmation of the change request received by MLRL staff from Omar’s congressional office.

“Two days after I published that video on social media,” Kern told us, “she called the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library and asked that her birth year be changed from 1981 to 1982. She also did it on her congressional page and Wikipedia. To me, that should raise a red flag. I’m a patriot; I believe that we should not have foreign nationals sitting in our Congress. It’s very clear that the qualifications to run – Article I, Section 2, clause 2 – you must be ‘seven years a citizen.’”

Omar’s congressional website does not currently state her birth year.

During the primary race, seeking to discover whether Omar is a U.S. citizen and constitutionally eligible to hold office, Kern asked Omar’s permission to access her naturalization records but never received a response. She similarly sent a request to a third primary candidate, Don Samuels, who was born in Jamaica but proffered no evidence he ever naturalized with the same result.

In a visit to the Minnesota secretary of state’s office, Kern was told that “there’s no authorization in the statutes for us to double-check on people, verify their status…we don’t verify that everybody is a citizen…”

In order to obtain answers, Kern resorted to filing suit in Minnesota’s Fourth Judicial District Court, naming Omar, and Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon defendants. Simon, Kern said, was negligent in his official capacity for failing to vet both foreign-born candidates for eligibility.

Approximately two months after Kern filed, Judge Bridget Ann Sullivan dismissed the case for several reasons, including that “Article I, section 5 of the United States Constitution…states the United States House of Representatives has final say over who is permitted to be a member of that chamber. State courts cannot override those requirements” [citation omitted].

Sullivan also accepted Samuels’s and Omar’s claims that they were never served with a summons.

On Wednesday Kern posted the letter she received from USCIS and a link to a video she produced in light of the outcome.

“We completed a thorough search for records based on the information you provided,” Robert Busey, USCIS FOIA Operations Program Manager wrote. “Unfortunately, we found no matching index reference. Our research included all variations of the subject’s name, including Nur Said Elmi Mohamed with the same results.”

“Why did I request Ilhan’s fathers records?” [sic] kERN began, continuing with:

Because Ilhan claims she gained citizenship when she was a 17 year old minor.

When an adult parent gains citizenship through the naturalization process, their minor children ‘derive’ citizenship through that parent. This is what Ilhan Omar has repeatedly claimed on the record… that she ‘derived’ citizenship through her father as a minor at the age of 17. (see video here)

Minors cannot naturalize independently and adults cannot derive citizenship from their parents.

So, although records requests would not be processed for a living foreign-born person without their permission, request records for the deceased are fully available through the USCIS. So I filed the request.

It took an entire year. I submitted the request June 2022 and I received a response on June 20, 2023 … which is also, ironically, World Refugee Day!

USCIS confirms Kern’s claim that a non-citizen child must be under 18 to derive U.S. citizenship from a parent.

Regarding her request, Kern said, she provided the year “1952” as Mohamed’s birth year while indicating it was “estimated.” She speculated that the reference to “1941” in USCIS’s response was a typographical error. When we asked if she considered whether USCIS’s search for Mohamed’s records could have been insufficient, she responded, “The birth date wasn’t critical. It’s the name, date they arrived in the U.S. (which was March 8, 1995) and verification of death.”

An article in The Blaze dated April 22, 2020 raises other questions about Omar’s background, including her previous identification of her father as “Nur Said.”

“On Aug. 12, 2016, Minnesota journalist Scott Johnson published proof that Omar was legally married to a British citizen,” The Blaze‘s David Steinberg wrote. “Johnson also published compelling evidence that the same man is Omar’s sibling. The husband’s name — Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — was the immediately apparent red flag. Online and in public, Omar had been referring to her father as Nur Said…Shortly after the publication of Scott Johnson’s article, posts on Omar’s verified social media accounts that identified her father as “Nur Said” were deleted. Several additional rounds of deletions have occurred in the three years since.”

On Thursday morning, The Post & Email contacted USCIS for more information on making FOIA requests to the agency; as of press time we have received no response.