No politician is more of an enigma than Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
For years she has been rumored to have married her brother - allegations she has called 'absurd and offensive'. Her family fortunes, steered by her white, American husband, have curiously skyrocketed to $30million.
And more recently, her Minneapolis community has been mired in shocking fraud allegations.
But even more disconcerting is the question about her citizenship.
Is Ilhan Omar really an American?
Under the Constitution, members of the House of Representatives must be at least 25 years old, a US citizen for at least seven years, and a resident of the state they represent when elected.
However, eligibility is typically self-certified and there is no routine requirement for candidates to publicly prove their citizenship unless formally challenged by Congress itself.
Omar contends that she obtained her US citizenship via her Somali-born father, who she claims became a naturalized citizen in 2000.
Ilhan Omar has long been dogged by allegations that she married her brother and conspiracy theories about her US citizenship.
Republican Nancy Mace on Wednesday asked the House Oversight Committee to subpoena Omar's immigration records.
If that was the case, she would possess a federal document, N-560 or N-561, aka a 'Certificate of Citizenship' that she would easily be able to produce. She has declined to do so.
Since the Minnesota Democrat was elected in 2019, former Minnesota Republican candidate AJ Kern has alleged that Omar is not a US citizen, supported by federal records searches she requested through immigration agencies.
Kern, 65, is one of several conservative Minneapolis activists who have been challenging Omar's citizenship and marriage claims as well as disclosing much of the rampant, estimated $9billion social services fraud in the state of Minnesota for more than a decade.
They all say they brought documentation to lawmakers and the media for years but were met with silence or being told they were racist.
This week, however, the allegations reached the lower house of Congress when Republican Nancy Mace asked the House Oversight Committee to subpoena Omar's immigration records.
Mace sought to formally examine the long-circulating claims about Omar's marriage and citizenship status on Wednesday, but the Committee ultimately halted the effort, after members ruled it was an issue for the House Ethics Committee to review.
According to documents obtained by Kern, there is no record of Omar's father, Nur Omar Mohamed, who died in 2020 from COVID complications, ever becoming a naturalized citizen.
Omar has always claimed that she became a citizen at 17 by something called 'derivation of citizenship,' meaning that Omar's citizenship came through her father after he became a naturalized US citizen while she was still a minor.
Omar has claimed she obtained US citizenship through her Somali-born father, Nur Omar Mohamed, who died in 2020, though there are no records of her or her father's naturalization have been found.
In 2020, a Daily Mail investigation aligned with the President's assertion that she skirted and took advantage of immigration rules to bring her brother, Ahmed Elmi (right), to the US by marrying him shortly after separating with her first husband Ahmed Hirsi (left) 45, the father of her three kids.
'That requires two things,' Kern told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview. 'He had to have been naturalized, and she had to be a minor.'
She said she found no proof that either was true.
Kern said she has pursued records - all viewed by the Daily Mail - related to Omar's father and says the federal government could not locate naturalization records for him.
She began her quest when covering refugees for a column she had with the St Cloud Times.
She discovered that Somalis who emigrate to Minnesota are immediately given a Social Security number which enables them to get a driver's license and in turn vote.
'I found out many of them never bother to get citizenship because why bother and it made me wonder about Omar's whole story. That's when I dug in.'
One letter from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a federal agency under the Department of Homeland Security, says they searched their database and they searched all variations of his name, and he is not in their database.
She also has what is called a 'certificate of non-existence,' from the DHS saying it could find no record of him.'
Former Minnesota Republican candidate AJ Kern has claimed Omar is not a US citizen - which she says is supported by federal records searches she requested through immigration agencies
A 2023 letter from US Citizenship and Immigration Services showed the agency could not find any records of Nur Omar Mohamed's naturalization upon Kern's request
The Department of Homeland Security also confirmed the 'nonexistence of an official Service record' for Omar's father
'So he did not naturalize,' Kern claims. 'They don't have him in their database. And that means that there is no record of her father becoming a citizen.'
Naturalization - which involves gathering paperwork, testing and an oath ceremony - is the standard process by which a foreign-born person becomes a US citizen.
Minors of a naturalized parent can get a certificate of citizenship.
Kern also alleges that Omar could not have derived citizenship from a parent's naturalization because, she says, Omar would not have been a minor at the time her father was eligible to apply.
'Omar and her family came on March 8, 1995,' Kern said, describing what she said was a five-year waiting period before eligibility to apply.
'So March 8, 2000 he was eligible to apply for naturalization.'
Kern said Omar’s publicly listed birth year has been a key part of her allegation that neither Omar or her father ever became US citizens.
'She always had a birth year or a birth date of October 4, 1981,' Kern said, adding that by 2000, 'she was already 18' and therefore not eligible for automatic citizenship via a naturalized parent.
Kern also shared emails between her friend and a staffer at the state's Legislative Library in 2019 confirming that Omar's team had reached out to them two days after Kern's video posted asking them to correct her birthdate to 1982.
Omar has refused to put the allegations and speculation to rest by providing proof or documentation.
Kern told the Daily Mail that she documented what she noticed as a change to Omar’s birth year on a Minnesota legislative biography page after Kern publicized her claims.
'On her original state Minnesota State Legislative page... she had a birth year of 1981,' Kern said.'
Kern made a video about it and posted it on Facebook on May 15, 2019.
'Two days later, after I posted on social media, she changed her birth year,' she said.
Kern showed the Daily Mail a letter sent by a staffer at the state's Legislative Library confirming that Omar's team had reached out to them two days after Kern's video posted, asking them to correct her birthdate to 1982.
A friend of Kern’s had written the library asking for an explanation of why her birthdate changed by a year.
'On May 17, 2019, Library staff were informed by Rep Omar’s congressional staff that her birth year was incorrect and requested that we change it to 1982,' wrote Elizabeth Lincoln, who was then on the reference desk of the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.
Kern said she has attempted to obtain Omar’s own naturalization records, which Kern acknowledged would require Omar’s consent for a private individual to request.
'Omar’s whole story is a lie,' Republican gubernatorial candidate Phil Parrish told the Daily Mail. 'But nobody has had the fortitude to stand up and say so.'
'Her father should never been allowed in; I’ve seen classified and unclassified data and they lied about birthdates and relationships.'
'A lot of this was systematically enabled by a flawed immigration agenda in Minnesota built on political activism.'
'Omar’s story is at the root.'
'They sold this whole thing as a big humanitarian project when it was anything but.'
Liz Collin, a longtime reporter and anchor for WCCO, Minneapolis’s premier TV news station, felt compelled to leave and join Alpha News, a small digital news outlet in 2022 when she found that her bosses were reluctant to pursue any stories post-George Floyd that were not in line with a woke, left wing viewpoint.
Collin was the only reporter in Minnesota to air Kern’s claims.
'There are a lot of questions about Omar’s marriage, her citizenship, her finances etc,' Collin told the Daily Mail,' adding that she has received numerous death threats and protests at her family's suburban home because of her reporting since 2022.
Omar has become influential not only in the United States but also in her home country. She met the president of the semi-autonomous state of Puntland, which considers itself part of Somalia but does not recognize the current government in 2022
Somali people in Mogadishu participate in a demonstration after Trump launched a tirade against Somali immigrants and in support of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in December
'Ironically a lot of the tips we get about the Somali fraud come from (local) reporters who can't tell the true story because it's not allowed.'
Kern said that Minnesota's voter registration system creates opportunities for non-citizens to register.
She recorded a conversation she had early on when she went to the Minnesota Secretary of State's office to ask them if they verify citizenship or not.
'She said no. So we have non-citizens registering to vote.'
Kern said she believes the constitutional responsibility for policing a member's qualifications ultimately rests with Congress.
Asked why she believes lawmakers have so far not pursued the matter, Kern said: 'I think it's about votes and money. I think they don't want to be seen as racist.'
Last November, when Trump went after Omar on Truth Social, urging her to leave the country, the congresswoman said she was unbothered.
'I have no worry, I don't know how they'd take away my citizenship and like deport me,' she said on The Dean Obeidallah Show.
'But I don't even know why that's such a scary threat. Like I'm not the eight-year-old who escaped war anymore. I’m grown; my kids are grown.'
'I could go live wherever I want if I wanted to. It’s a weird thing to wake up every single day to bring that into every single conversation, ‘we’re gonna deport Ilhan’,' Omar said.
Kern told the Daily Mail: 'I've always really been driven by the truth, but I almost feel, does the truth even matter anymore in Minnesota?
'You're automatically labeled a racist if you speak up. This is scary, and fear is a powerful thing.'
Omar did not return messages from the Daily Mail.