“When you have high-profile, vindictive cases about somebody’s citizenship, it really makes citizenship feel insecure for every naturalized citizen,” Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor at Case Western who has studied denaturalization cases, told me. “It means that any naturalized citizen is going to be very cautious about criticizing the government.”
The Trump administration has spent the last several years laying the groundwork for these kinds of cases. Stephen Miller broached the idea on the campaign trail in 2024; since then, it’s been used by right-wingers to threaten New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, pro-Palestine protestors, and anyone whose ancestry can be traced to people who immigrated in the last half century.
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The theory that her father put down the wrong date was first popularized by a right-wing wing activist named Aliena Jeanene (AJ) Kern. She’s described Omar as a “foreign nationalist,” and spent years trying to persuade people that Omar was never properly naturalized, and should therefore be stripped of her citizenship.
Kern, a onetime Congressional candidate in Minnesota, appears to have embraced QAnon during Trump’s first term, per Facebook posts reviewed by TPM. At some point, she began to request records from USCIS and other government agencies about Omar’s family’s citizenship records. This, combined with an active X account, snowballed into appearances over the past year on right-wing outlets including NewsMax, AlphaNews, and the Daily Mail. Kern also challenged Omar in the 2022 Democratic primary, attempting to use it as a vehicle to disqualify Omar and spread her theory.
It’s not clear whether Kern’s allegations served as the basis for the federal government’s searches or otherwise tipped off Trump administration officials. Kiersten Piels, a DOJ spokesperson, declined to comment.
