Omar Search: Her Age in 2000 and the Time Limit on a Case

Details as of Oct. 14, 2026. The warrant is sealed and Rep. Ilhan Omar has not been charged. She denies wrongdoing. Most of what is known about the investigation comes from people familiar with it and from officials who have not shown evidence.

Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home in the Washington, D.C., area on Monday, Oct. 12, under a judicially authorized warrant, the Justice Department said. It called the search “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, called the search “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” Her office called it “an outrageous abuse of power” and said she has done nothing wrong, Time reported. The question reported to be at the center is how old Omar was in 2000, when her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, became a U.S. citizen. Her age then decides whether she could take citizenship through him. A second question is how long the government has to bring a case, because the deadline depends on whether the case is criminal or civil and on the date of any misstatement.

What investigators are reported to be examining

People familiar with the matter told The Washington Post that investigators are focused on whether Omar or her father intentionally misstated her birth date to make her a minor when he naturalized. The allegation that she was 18, not 17, spread through a viral video in 2019, the Post reported. One person familiar with the warrant told the Post that it lists potential charges of conspiracy, immigration fraud and false statements. A Trump administration official told the Post that investigators are also looking at whether her father omitted or misstated his military service when he sought legal status. He died in 2020. The Post reported that Homeland Security Investigations began a renewed look at her immigration history earlier this year, and that grand jury subpoenas have gone to some of her relatives in recent days. Time, citing The New York Times, mentioned her sister Sahra Noor in connection with the subpoenas.

The age rule in 2000

When a parent became a U.S. citizen through the immigration process in 2000, called naturalizing, federal law let a child under 18 who held a green card and lived in the United States become a citizen along with the parent. This is called derivative citizenship. Both parents generally had to naturalize, with exceptions that include a surviving parent after the other has died, according to a guide from the law firm 311 Immigration. Congress repealed that rule in a law signed Oct. 30, 2000, and the replacement took effect 120 days later. It needs only one citizen parent. Wikipedia says Omar’s mother died when she was two. No report says how the old two-parent rule applies to her or what date in 2000 her father naturalized.

Omar’s birth date and her account

Omar’s birth date is Oct. 4, 1982, according to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library. That would make her 17 for the part of 2000 before Oct. 4. Under the 1981 date that sources listed for years, she would have been 18 or older throughout 2000, past the cutoff. Omar told The New York Times she became a citizen at 17, Time reported. On a 2018 Intercept podcast she said, “My father became a citizen and so I got my citizenship through that process.” No official records of her citizenship are public. In 2019 Snopes rated a separate claim, that she had been a citizen longer than Melania Trump, as unproven because no records are public, and called the 2000 date and age 17 plausible but unverified.

Where the 1981 date came from

For years the library listed Omar’s birth date as Oct. 4, 1981. Breitbart, summarizing a New York Post story, reported that on May 17, 2019, after a political opponent’s video questioned her age, her congressional staff asked the library to change the year to 1982. The library director wrote on May 24, 2019 that the original entry had not been supported by documentation and that Omar’s staff was working with Wikipedia and the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress to correct them, Breitbart reported. The library’s page now says, “Her birth year is correct. It is incorrectly reported as 1981 in other sources.” The Washington Post reported that Omar has repeatedly said the requests were meant to correct mistakes, not to cover anything up.

A.J. Kern, who challenged Omar in the 2022 Democratic primary, has questioned her age and her account of her father’s naturalization. Breitbart noted that Kern’s claims do not establish that Omar obtained citizenship improperly. No report cites a government document that lists 1981 or shows a false birth date on a citizenship application.

Time limits

Cases to take a person’s citizenship away, called denaturalization, can be brought as criminal prosecutions or as civil lawsuits. The Post reported that criminal cases have a 10-year statute of limitations, a deadline for the government to bring a case, and that civil cases have none. The criminal deadline is in federal law. No one may be prosecuted for violating sections 1423 to 1428 of Title 18, which include unlawfully obtaining naturalization, or for conspiring to violate them, unless an indictment is brought “within ten years after the commission of the offense.” Most other federal crimes carry five years. The reports do not say which laws the warrant cites or when any misstatement was made. The Post describes the focus as the paperwork from her father’s naturalization in 2000. If a false statement was made then, the ten-year and five-year criminal deadlines ended years ago, and a case would depend on the civil route or on later conduct the reports have not described.

The government has to meet a high standard in a civil case. Attorney Yuripzy Morgan told Time that it must show clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence that citizenship was obtained illegally or by willful misrepresentation of a material fact. For criminal denaturalization, Time reported, the Supreme Court held unanimously in Maslenjak v. United States (2017) that only an illegal act that played a role in the citizenship application can support it. Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge at the Center for Immigration Studies, told Time that denaturalization does not by itself mean deportation, because a person with a green card keeps that status until ICE issues a final removal order. The cases are rare, averaging about 11 a year from 1990 to 2017 according to the Migration Policy Institute, though the Justice Department has announced efforts to strip citizenship from at least 108 people in 2026, Time reported.

Reaction and the 60-day practice

President Trump said he had “nothing to do with” the search and called Omar “totally crooked,” Time reported. Vice President JD Vance said in March that Omar “definitely committed immigration fraud.” In May he said he did not want to prejudge an investigation but that “something fishy is there.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in September that the probe was “not political” and claimed Omar married her brother. Her office denies it, and the claim dates to 2016, Reason reported. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Trump was abusing his power weeks before an election. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the search “deeply disturbing,” and Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, called it an “authoritarian abuse of power.”

ABC News reported that Justice Department practice advises prosecutors not to take overt investigative steps against members of Congress or candidates within 60 days of an election. Time gave search warrants as an example. The midterms were 22 days away, ABC said. ABC did not say whether the department addressed the practice in this case.

Editor written. AI used for spelling and grammar only.