Is Ilhan Omar a US Citizen?

Ilhan Omar is in serious trouble.

The Constitution requires

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

There are three possible grounds to believe that Ilhan Omar has never been an American citizen and that she could be denaturalized. 1) She may have been an adult when her father was supposedly naturalized. 2) Her father may never have been naturalized. 3) Her father could potentially be denaturalized as a war criminal.

On the first ground, Ilhan Omar has claimed that she received derivative citizenship in 2000 when her father, Col. Nur Mohamed Omar, was naturalized. She claims that she was 17 years old in 2000, so she was eligible for automatic naturalization as a minor child.

In 2022, however, her Democratic primary opponent, A. J. Kern, noticed that the Minnesota state legislative reference listed her birth date as October 4, 1981, meaning that she would have been 18 and thus ineligible for derivative citizenship in 2000. Omar's US congressional staff requested that her birth year be "corrected" to 1982, thus making her 17 at the time of her father's naturalization.

On the second ground: Unsatisfied with the response to her campaign's charge, Kern made FOIA requests to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service and Homeland Security for Ilhan's father's naturalization file. Those files are sealed until the applicant's death. Since her father died in June 2020, his naturalization file should be in the public record. But both agencies responded that they could find no record of his naturalization.

Did her father even file a naturalization application? If her father was never naturalized, then Ilhan is not a US citizen.

Regarding the third ground, there are potential reasons for denaturalizing her father. He was a colonel in the brutal Marxist dictatorship of Siad Barre that killed 200,000 Somalis. There are rumors that he participated in the genocide of the opposition Isaaq clan in the north of the country. He and his family escaped from Somalia in 1991 and fled to Kenya when the Marxist regime collapsed. US law allows for war criminals to be denaturalized. If her father were denaturalized, a question arises as to whether Ilhan also loses her supposed derivative citizenship, even though there is no accusation that she participated in his war crimes since she was a child at the time.

Her fictitious marriage to her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 to bring him from London to the US to get him out of the bad circles that he had fallen into would be immigration fraud. She divorced him in 2017, a month before marrying her second (now ex-) husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi. However, it appears that the statute of limitations has lapsed. Unless the feds can find some basis for tolling the statute of limitations, she is no longer in jeopardy on this fraud.

Ilhan Omar has played fast and loose with the law for decades and gotten away with it because of her strident liberalism. Witness the sudden changes in her latest congressional financial disclosures. But the chickens may now be coming home to roost.