Did Ilhan Omar change her birth year in official records?

Claim:

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., altered her birth year in official records from 1981 to 1982.

Rating:

Context

According to The Washington Post, Omar said that requests to change her birth year were due to it being incorrect, not to cover up the truth. We found evidence to support that she was 17 in the year 2000.

As U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., entered the final weeks of her reelection bid in October, federal agents searched her home in a criminal investigation reportedly related to claims that she or her father may have lied on immigration paperwork when she sought to secure legal status in the U.S. decades earlier.

In an Oct. 12 statement on X, Omar said called the search “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” It is unusual for a federal agency to publicly investigate someone running for office so close to Election Day.

Following the search, numerous social media posts claimed Omar was not a minor in 2000 — the year she reportedly became a U.S. citizen after her father naturalized — saying that official records indicated her birth year was originally listed as 1981 before it was later changed to 1982. Some of the posts said this indicated citizenship fraud.

We looked into the evidence and found that while her birth year was changed in official records, according to The Washington Post, she said this was to fix incorrect information rather than cover up the truth. We found other pieces of evidence indicating she could’ve indeed been a minor in 2000, including her high school yearbook and reports by reputable news outlets in 2018.

Omar has long maintained that she was 17 when she became a citizen in 2000 — receiving citizenship by default, according to U.S. law, after her father was naturalized. 

In 2018, two years after she first ran for public office, articles by The Associated Press and The New York Times reported she had become a U.S. citizen in 2000, when she was 17.

In addition to the 2018 news reports, we found a high school yearbook showing Omar was a junior in 2000 and that she was in the graduating class of 2001. While not definitive proof, it supports the claim that Omar was not yet an adult when her family applied for citizenship.

Omar attended Edison High School in Minneapolis. As a member of the class of 2001, she was listed under the “Juniors” section in the 2000 yearbook.

(Classmates.com / Snopes illustration)

Her family fled Somalia in the early 1990s during the country’s civil war, eventually arriving in the U.S. in 1995 before applying for citizenship five years later. 

Archived versions of her profile in official records, such as the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, show that at one time, Omar’s birth year was listed as 1981 — which would have made it unlikely for her to be a minor in 2000.

The circulated posts above took screenshots of an archived version of that website along with the current version (archived), noting that her birth year was changed from 1981 to 1982.

A note on the current version of her profile read:

Her birth year is correct. It is incorrectly reported as 1981 in other sources. As of May 24, 2019, Rep. Omar’s congressional staff are working with Wikipedia and the U.S. House to correct her birth year in those sources.

In a emailed statement to Snopes, David Schmidtke, deputy director of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, confirmed that “congressional staff contacted the library regarding her birthdate.” 

“However, we do not have supporting documentation, as the information was ‘self-reported,’” he wrote. “The library does not independently verify birthdates before publishing or updating them.”

We contacted Omar’s office seeking comment on the speculation surrounding her birth year and have not yet received a response. We will update this story if we do.

Sources