The Trump administration’s immigration fraud case against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), reportedly working toward deporting the Somali-born congresswoman, is complicated by a host of procedural factors that range from the timing of the alleged offenses to who filled out the forms that granted her citizenship.
Much of the speculation about the federal case against Omar centers on whether her father lied to immigration authorities regarding the congresswoman’s actual age at the time he became a naturalized citizen.
Fox News reported that the raid of Omar’s residence on Oct. 12 stemmed from a criminal fraud investigation into the Minnesota Democrat’s immigration paperwork, which sources said was filed by her father when she was a child.
However, her father, the hypothetical defendant in this case, is deceased. Nur Omar Mohamed, the congresswoman’s father, died from COVID-19 complications in 2020.
Omar says she obtained U.S. citizenship in 2000 at 17 through her father, when he naturalized. Foreign-born minor children automatically become U.S. citizens upon the naturalization of a parent.
ILHAN OMAR IMMIGRATION HISTORY: SCRUTINY SURROUNDS FAMILY’S REFUGEE CLAIMS
Where she may have allegedly provided false information to the federal government, though, would not be found on a traditional citizenship application, but rather whenever Omar or Omar’s father applied for documentary proof of her derivative citizenship.
Children born outside the United States are not automatically issued documents showing that they derived citizenship through their parents because derivative citizenship is granted by a statutory mechanism, explained Andrew Arthur, the resident law and policy fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Arthur, a former immigration judge who has heard thousands of deportation cases and considered asylum applications, said such immigrants seeking physical documentation of their new citizenship status must either file an N-600 to receive a certificate of citizenship or apply for a passport with the U.S. State Department.
“If Rep. Omar fraudulently applied for either a citizenship certificate or a passport after she turned 18, her claimed status — if any — could be revoked, which would return her to green card status,” Arthur told the Washington Examiner. “At that point, the fraud would potentially make her deportable.” There is no public evidence that Omar committed fraud in obtaining citizenship as a teenager.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services instructions for Form N-600 stipulate that a parent or legal guardian may file the application on behalf of a minor child. Those over the age of 18, however, must file the N-600 themselves.
Children ages 16 and 17 can apply for a U.S. passport provided they have parental permission.
Regardless of who actually submitted the applications in question, the statute of limitations has long expired if Omar’s submissions date back to the early 2000s. The federal statute of limitations for prosecuting immigration crimes is 10 years, or within a decade of the “commission of the offense.” That 10-year prosecution deadline also applies to conspiracy to violate U.S. immigration law.
Lying on a U.S. passport application, including making false statements about one’s age or attaching forged birth certificates, is a crime in itself, generally punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison. The statute of limitations concerning passport fraud is even shorter, set at a prosecutable period of five years.
2019 inquiry determined fraud claims were not worth pursuing
An earlier federal investigation of Omar’s immigration history, which reportedly examined many of the same fraud claims now under review, seemingly found no issues with how she acquired her citizenship.
Former immigration officials in the first Trump administration told the Washington Post that investigators were ordered in 2019 to review her immigration records for signs of fraud.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations, eventually concluded that there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to pursue a case against the newly elected congresswoman.
Investigators determined they could not answer questions concerning Omar’s age, given that refugees often come from countries with little to no birth records on file, making it difficult to determine key facts with certainty.
Birth year discrepancy
Omar’s actual birth year, also at the center of the latest controversy, may be less of a smoking gun than her conservative critics believe.
Her staff had her birth date changed in state and federal records, from 1981 to 1982, after she was elected to Congress, which made the amendment requests seem to critics like attempts to conceal her true age rather than simple corrections of inaccurate information.
However, the record-keeping offices that altered Omar’s biographical details appeared to have relied initially on secondhand information, in which one resource repository sourced unverified information from another, and so forth.
The fraud suspicions stem from the government website for the Minnesota legislature originally listing Omar’s birth year as 1981, which would have made her 18 years old at the time her father naturalized and therefore a legal adult ineligible to acquire derivative U.S. citizenship.
Her birth year on the state legislature’s site has since been corrected to 1982, a note at the bottom of Omar’s government biography now reads.
“It is incorrectly reported as 1981 in other sources,” the site says. “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.”
Her office was indeed able to edit the congresswoman’s congressional biography as well as Omar’s personal Wikipedia page, which cited a civic-engagement platform that is no longer operational.
Emails reviewed by the New York Post show that the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library based the initial 1981 birth year on “widely available” information from Wikipedia and the biographical directory of Congress.
In response to a Washington Examiner inquiry, the legislative archives center said its database of state lawmakers sometimes pulls biographical data from third-party sources without independent verification.
David Schmidtke, the reference library’s deputy director, confirmed that Omar’s congressional staff previously contacted the center to correct her birth date but did not provide documentary proof, as the archives center does not require evidence that corroborates “self-reported” information.
“However, we do not have supporting documentation, as the information was ‘self-reported.’ The library does not independently verify birthdates before publishing or updating them,” Schmidtke told the Washington Examiner.
When she first ran for Congress in 2018, Omar’s congressional campaign said that she could not retrieve her birth certificate because the Somali civil war had collapsed the government’s infrastructure.
Omar’s office did not respond to a Washington Examiner request for any corroborating documentation of her birth year.
Contemporaneous records, however, support the congresswoman’s claim that she was still a minor when her father became a naturalized citizen.
According to the fact-checking site Snopes.com, her high school yearbook shows that Omar was a junior in 2000. That year’s Edison High School yearbook identified Omar, appearing in the “Juniors” section, as a member of the graduating class of 2001.
DID ILHAN OMAR MARRY HER OWN BROTHER? THE CLAIMS EXPLAINED
Under state law, Minnesota school districts may request some form of age verification from students applying to enroll in the public school system. Following a Washington Examiner inquiry into Omar’s admissions records, a public information officer for Minneapolis Public Schools said that a student’s date of birth is confidential data excluded from public disclosure.
Omar’s alma mater, North Dakota State University, similarly said that student records containing personally identifiable information are protected by the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. “Even if such information was in NDSU’s possession,” a school spokesperson said, “NDSU could not release it without the consent of the student.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
