Either Ilhan Omar Lied About Her Age In Her Autobiography, Or She’s Lying Now

The autobiography written by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., appears to prove she was an adult at the time she says her father obtained U.S. citizenship in 2000. Omar herself obtained citizenship on the basis of her reported status as a minor at the time, but statements in her book, as well as government records, indicate she was an adult. Ilhan Omar — or Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, as U.S. government documents identify her — has claimed that her birthday is Oct. 4, 1982, making her 17 years old for most of the year 2000. Claims in at least two parts of her autobiography strongly suggest, however, that her birthday is actually in 1981, making her at least 18 throughout 2000, and therefore not eligible to receive citizenship under the sponsorship of her father. “I was eight years old when civil war broke out in Somalia. One day everything was okay, and the next, there were bullets piercing not only buildings but also people,” Elmi said in a chapter called “War: 1989-1991, Mogadishu, Somalia.” The claim that she was 8 in 1989 points to a birth year of 1981, meaning she was 18 or 19 in 2000 at the time of her naturalization. In another chapter called “Return: 2011-2012, Fargo, North Dakota, to Africa to Minneapolis, Minnesota,” Elmi once again made claims that would give her a 1981 birth year, as opposed to 1982. During a three-month trip back to Somalia in 2011, Elmi said, “I was thirty years old.” But the references to a 1981 birth do not stop in her autobiography. A 2019 article in The Atlantic said Elmi was “all of two months old when the December 1981 massacre took place” in El Salvador. A 2019 BBC profile also said she was born “the youngest of seven siblings in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu in 1981.” A 2019 profile in Swiss outlet Le Temps stated she was born in 1981. Dawn, a Pakistani news organization, said she was 37 in November 2018, meaning she turned 19 in 2000, and that she was born in 1981. The Minnesota legislature’s member page for Elmi currently says her birthday conforms with her claimed date: Oct. 4, 1982. But that page was altered from its 2019 version, which shows her birthday as Oct. 4, 1981. 2019 was also the year Elmi left the Minnesota legislature to become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Library of Congress lists her birthday as Oct. 4, 1981, but her congressional biography says it’s the same day in 1982. The changes from 1981 to 1982 came around 2019 when Elmi’s congressional staff contacted the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, as well as Wikipedia and the U.S. House recordkeepers, and requested that her birth date be changed. The Minnesota library explained to Snopes that it updated the records unquestioningly, stating, “We do not have supporting documentation, as the information was ‘self-reported.’ … The library does not independently verify birthdates before publishing or updating them.” Elmi is currently under investigation for immigration fraud, and there is mounting evidence she married her brother as part of that fraud. Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. As an investigative journalist, he previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.