Comment Re:Two more years (Score 1) 85
Ilhan Omar’s widely published birth date of October 4, 1981 means she turned 18 in 1999 and 19 in 2000, and therefore, was ineligible to gain citizenship by derivation.
None of which is legally an adequate reason to remove someone's citizenship two decades or more later. Filing the wrong form would be considered a minor clerical error. It should have been rejected at the time, and she should have had to file the correct form at the time, but once citizenship is granted, that's moot.
There is a general presumption in the law that citizenship cannot be revoked unless all of the following criteria are true:
- That person misrepresented or concealed something
- The misrepresentation or concealment was willful
- The misrepresentation or concealment was material to the decision to grant citizenship
None of those apply, much less all of them. Omar did not misrepresent anything; her father did. The misrepresentation was probably not willful. See also the comments above about birth records in Somalia. And being born a year earlier is not material to the decision to grant citizenship. It is only material to whether that specific form would have been accepted or a different form would have been needed.
So absent some significant evidence that something else was omitted as a side effect of using the wrong form (which is incredibly unlikely), this would be a clerical error, subject to possible civil penalties against the father, were he still alive, and that's about it.
This isn't just a little bit short of the threshold required for removing citizenship. This is so far from reaching the threshold that even the most conservative immigration judge in the country would laugh in their faces for even making the attempt, and probably hit them with contempt charges for wasting the court's time.