How some of the state's welfare funds ended up in the hands of a terror group

/ Eye on the News / Politics and Law

Nov 19 2025

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Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots.

In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

Our investigation shows what happens when a tribal mindset meets a bleeding-heart bureaucracy, when imported clan loyalties collide with a political class too timid to offend, and when accusations of racism are cynically deployed to shield criminal behavior. The predictable result is graft, with taxpayers left to foot the bill.

If you were to design a welfare program to facilitate fraud, it would probably look a lot like Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program. The HSS program, the first of its kind in the country, was launched with a noble goal: to help seniors, addicts, the disabled, and the mentally ill secure housing. It was designed with “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.” Nonetheless, before the program went live in 2020, officials pegged its annual estimated price tag at $2.6 million.

Costs quickly spiraled out of control. In 2021, the program paid out more than $21 million in claims. In the following years, annual costs shot up to $42 million, then $74 million, then $104 million. During the first six months of 2025, payouts totaled $61 million.

On August 1, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services moved to scrap the HSS program, noting that payment to 77 housing-stabilization providers had been terminated this year due to “credible allegations of fraud.” Joe Thompson, then the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, went even further, stating that the “vast majority” of the HSS program was fraudulent.

On September 18, Thompson announced criminal indictments for HSS fraud against Moktar Hassan Aden, Mustafa Dayib Ali, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, Christopher Adesoji Falade, Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, Asad Ahmed Adow, and Anwar Ahmed Adow—six of whom, according a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson, are members of Minnesota’s Somali community. Thompson made clear that this is just the first round of charges for HSS fraud that his office will be prosecuting.

“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling,” Thompson said at a press conference announcing the indictments. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”

Thompson said many firms enrolled in the program “operated out of dilapidated storefronts or rundown office buildings.” The perpetrators often targeted people recently released from rehab, signing them up for Medicaid services they had no intention of providing. He noted many owners of companies engaged in HSS fraud had “other companies through which they billed other Medicaid programs, such as the EIDBI autism program, the . . . Adult Rehabilitative Mental Health Services program, the . . . Integrated Community Support program, the Community Access for Disability Inclusion . . . program, PCA services, and other Medicaid-waivered services.”

“What we see are schemes stacked upon schemes, draining resources meant for those in need. It feels never ending,” Thompson said. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor and the depth of the fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.”

On September 18, the same day that the HSS fraud charges were announced, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reported that a man named Abdullahe Nur Jesow had become the 56th defendant to plead guilty in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.

Founded in 2016, Feeding Our Future was a small Minnesota nonprofit that sponsored daycares and after-school programs to enroll in the Federal Child Nutrition Program. The organizations that Feeding Our Future sponsored were primarily owned and operated by members of Minnesota’s Somali community, according to two former state officials with connections to law enforcement.

In 2019, Feeding Our Future received $3.4 million in federal funding disbursed by the state. In the months after the Covid-19 pandemic began, however, the nonprofit rapidly increased its number of sponsored sites. Using fake meal counts, doctored attendance records, and fabricated invoices, the perpetrators of the fraud ring claimed to be serving thousands of meals a day, seven days a week, to underprivileged children. In 2021, Feeding Our Future received nearly $200 million in funding.

In reality, the money was being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya. In 2020, Minnesota officials raised concerns about the nonprofit’s rapid expansion. In response, the group filed a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination related to outstanding site applications, noting that Feeding Our Future “caters to . . . foreign nationals.”

“That’s the standard operating playbook for that cohort: when in doubt, claim racism, claim bias,” says David Gaither, a former Minnesota state senator and a nonprofit leader. “Even if the facts don’t point to that, it allows for many folks in the middle, or on the center-Left, to stay silent.”

Gaither believes the mainstream media, alongside Minnesota’s Democratic establishment, have long turned a blind eye to fraud within the Somali community. This, in turn, allowed the problem to metastasize. “The media does not want to put a light on this,” Gaither said. “And if you’re a politician, it’s a significant disadvantage for you to alienate the Somali community. If you don’t win the Somali community, you can’t win Minneapolis. And if you don’t win Minneapolis, you can’t win the state. End of story.”

The fraudsters have leveraged their growing political influence to cultivate close ties with Minnesota’s elected officials. Several individuals involved in the Feeding Our Future scheme donated to, or appeared publicly with, Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman from Minneapolis. Omar’s deputy district director, Ali Isse, advocated on behalf of Feeding Our Future. Omar Fateh, a former state senator who recently ran for Minneapolis mayor, lobbied Governor Tim Walz in support of the program. And one of the accused, Abdi Nur Salah, served as a senior aide to Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey.

Just days later, on September 24, U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson announced his office’s first indictment in yet another fraud case. This time, the scheme involved federally funded autism services for children.

The accused is a woman named Asha Farhan Hassan, a member of Minnesota’s Somali community, who has also been charged in the Feeding Our Future scam. She’s alleged to have played a role in a $14 million fraud scheme perpetrated against Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program.

Hassan and her co-conspirators “approached parents in the Somali community” and recruited their children into autism therapy services. It didn’t matter, prosecutors suggested, if a child did not have an autism diagnosis: Hassan would facilitate a fraudulent one.

In a press release announcing the indictment, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made clear that the alleged autism fraud scheme extended to a wide network of people. “To drive up enrollment, Hassan and her partners paid monthly cash kickback payments to the parents of children who enrolled,” the release reads. “These kickback payments ranged from approximately $300 to $1500 per month, per child. The amount of these payments was contingent on the services DHS authorized a child to receive—the higher the authorization amount, the higher the kickback. Often, parents threatened to leave . . . and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.”

Much like with the HSS program, autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years—from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million 2021, $279 million in 2022, and $399 million in 2023. Meantime, the number of autism providers in the state spiked from 41 to 328 over the same period, with many in the Somali community establishing their own autism treatment centers, citing the need for “culturally appropriate programming.” By the time the fraud scheme was exposed, one in 16 Somali four-year-olds in the state had reportedly been diagnosed with autism—a rate more than triple the state average.

“This is not an isolated scheme,” Thompson, the U.S. attorney, said in a press release. “From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network.”

What Thompson arguably hinted at, but left unsaid, should be obvious: this “network” of “fraud schemes,” which “form a web” that has stolen “billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” involved many members of Minnesota’s Somali community. The Feeding Our Future, HSS, and autism-services cases are far from the only examples. At least 28 fraud scandals have surfaced since Walz was elected governor in 2019. Most of the large-scale fraud rings, according to two former FBI officials who spoke with City Journal, have been perpetrated by members of the Somali community.

Kayesh Magan, a Somali-American who had worked as a fraud investigator at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, identified the problem last year: “We must grapple with something that is uncomfortable and true: Nearly all of the defendants in the cases I’ve listed are from my community. The Somali community.”

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Somalia fraud story is the scale, with total costs running into the billions of taxpayer dollars. That raises the question: What happened to all that money?

The Somali fraud rings have sent huge sums in remittances, or money transfers, from Minnesota to Somalia. According to reports, an estimated 40 percent of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion—more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.

Our investigation reveals, for the first time, that some of this money has been directed to an even more troubling destination: the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab. According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of “hawalas,” informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab.

According to Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Somalis ran a sophisticated money network, spanning from Seattle to Minneapolis, and were routing significant amounts of cash on commercial flights from the Seattle airport to the hawala networks in Somalia. One of these networks, Kerns discovered, sent $20 million abroad in a single year. “The amount of money was staggering,” Kerns said.

Kerns’s investigation eventually expanded to Minnesota, where he realized the same thing was happening. “I worked on it for five years,” Kerns said. “We had sources going into the hawalas to send money. I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well shit, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits. How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: this is welfare fraud.”

Kerns then investigated the hawalas in Somalia that were receiving the money transfers. He determined, primarily through human sources, that significant funds were being sent from America to Al-Shabaab networks in Somalia. Whether the money was intended for Al-Shabaab or not, Kerns said, they were taking a cut.

A second former official, who worked on the Minneapolis JTTF, confirms the story’s general structure. This former official, who requested to remain anonymous, worked on two terrorism cases that intersected with Minnesota’s Somali community and has studied the flow of funds from Minnesota to Somalia.

“Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits Al-Shabaab in some way,” the former official said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, Al-Shabaab is . . . taking a cut of it.”

A third source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the close links between the Somali-American community in Minnesota and Islamic terror groups abroad. Ten years ago, the source was recruited as an “independent contractor” for a three-letter agency investigation into the “Minnesota men” who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. That year, a Homeland Security task force report found that Minnesota led the nation in the number of Americans who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. Of the 58 Americans who had done so, nearly half came from Minnesota.

Scott Johnson, who has covered these and related stories for years, attended several of those men’s trials, reporting on them for City Journal. He noted that the Minnesota men “gave the outward appearance of American assimilation”—including being “sophisticated users of social-welfare benefits.”

The relationship is ongoing. “This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” the third source said. “There is an issue here that is real, and if there is ever an event that is traceable back to these funds, or to people from this area, then this situation will take on a whole new set of optics.”

Welfare fraud is likely to become a major issue in Minnesota’s 2026 elections. Governor Tim Walz, now seeking a third term, has presided over a litany of scandals and faces Republican Kristin Robbins, who has made fraud prevention central to her campaign.

Gaither, the former state senator, said “political blowback is brewing” in the state and that, as more information emerges from ongoing investigations, “it’s a real rough place to be if you’re the current administration.” He added that if you talk to law-enforcement officials and others close to the probes, “they will tell you off the record that we aren’t even close to being halfway there” in understanding the true scale of the fraud.

The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging it. By extension, that means recognizing the problem’s true source. So far, Minnesota’s governing class and its media establishment have failed to take that basic step. Minnesotans will have to confront the uncomfortable but unavoidable reality: members of the Somali community have played a central role in the massive fraud now engulfing the North Star State.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/minnesota-welfare-fraud-somalia-al-shabaab

So Somalis shouldn't get welfare because they are brown, Trumpkins?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5800275&forum_id=2/#49446295)

But I thought the Great Replacement was a racist conspiracy theory.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5800275&forum_id=2/#49449126)

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2025/11/17/minneapolis-non-profits-cry-racism-over-fraud-crackdown-n2666552

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5800275&forum_id=2/#49449192)

a Hennepin County judge (deep blue Minneapolis), where judges are elected for six year terms, reversed the jury verdict. the state will appeal.

https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1993288561030746470

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5800275&forum_id=2/#49458930)

“While the Court is troubled by the manner in which fraud was able to be perpetuated at Promise, the State’s evidence did not exclude other reasonable, rational inferences that are inconsistent with Mr. Yusuf’s guilt,” West wrote. "

oh.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5800275&forum_id=2/#49462647)

https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1993443255607083254

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5800275&forum_id=2/#49462965)

====

How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch

Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration.

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Joseph H. Thompson, in a blue suit and light blue tie, holds on to a lectern while standing beside several other men in suits.

Joseph H. Thompson, center, the federal prosecutor overseeing the cases, at the U.S. District Courthouse in Minneapolis in September.Credit...Ben Brewer for The New York Times

Ernesto Londoño

By Ernesto Londoño

Reporting from Minneapolis

Nov. 29, 2025

Updated 7:08 a.m. ET

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.

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Outrage has swelled among Minnesotans, and fraud has turned into a potent political issue in a competitive campaign season. Gov. Tim Walz and fellow Democrats are being asked to explain how so much money was stolen on their watch, providing Republicans, who hope to take back the governor’s office in 2026, with a powerful line of attack.

In recent days, President Trump has weighed in, calling Minnesota “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity” and saying that Somali perpetrators should be sent “back to where they came from.”

Many Somali Americans in Minnesota say the fraud has damaged the reputation of their entire community, around 80,000 people, at a moment when their political and economic standing was on the rise.

Debate over the fraud has opened new rifts between the state’s Somali community and other Minnesotans, and has left some Somali Americans saying they are unfairly facing a new layer of suspicion against all of them, rather than the small group accused of fraud. Critics of the Walz administration say that the fraud persisted partly because state officials were fearful of alienating the Somali community in Minnesota. Governor Walz, who has instituted new fraud-prevention safeguards, defended his administration’s actions.

The episode has raised broader questions for some residents about the sustainability of Minnesota’s Scandinavian-modeled system of robust safety net programs bankrolled by high taxes. That system helped create an environment that drew immigrants to the state over many decades, including tens of thousands of Somali refugees after their country descended into civil war in the 1990s.

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“No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud,” Joseph H. Thompson, the federal prosecutor who has overseen the fraud cases said in an interview. “We’re losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way.”

Surge of Cases

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Several high-rise buildings.

Minneapolis is home to one of the largest Somali-American communities in the United States.Credit...Ben Brewer for The New York Times

The first public sign of a major problem in the state’s social services system came in 2022, when federal prosecutors began charging defendants in connection to a program aimed at feeding hungry children. Merrick B. Garland, attorney general during the Biden administration, called it the country’s largest pandemic relief fraud scheme.

The prosecutors focused on a Minneapolis nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future, which became a partner to dozens of local businesses that enrolled as feeding sites.

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State agencies reimbursed the group and its partners for invoices claiming to have fed tens of thousands of children. In reality, federal prosecutors said, most of the meals were nonexistent, and business owners spent the funds on luxury cars, houses and even real estate projects abroad.

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Behind the scenes, as federal investigators sifted through bank records and interviewed witnesses, they said they realized that the meals fraud was not an isolated incident. In September, prosecutors charged nine people in two new plots tied to public funds meant for those in need.

In one case, hundreds of providers were reimbursed for assistance they claimed to have provided to people at risk for homelessness, though federal authorities said services weren’t provided.

The program’s annual cost ballooned to more than $104 million last year, the authorities said, from a budgeted projection of $2.6 million when it began in 2020. Two of eight people charged in the scenario have pleaded guilty; six others have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

In another program, aimed to provide therapy for autistic children, prosecutors said providers recruited children in Minneapolis’s Somali community, falsely certifying them as qualifying for autism treatment and paying their parents kickbacks for their cooperation.

Prosecutors have so far charged one provider, Asha Farhan Hassan, 29, with wire fraud. They say she and business partners stole $14 million.

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Ryan Pacyga, Ms. Hassan’s lawyer, said his client had entered the social services field with good intentions, but eventually began to submit fraudulent invoices. He said she intends to plead guilty.

Ms. Hassan is of Somali ancestry, as are all but eight of the 86 people charged in the meals, housing and autism therapy fraud cases, according to prosecutors. A vast majority are American citizens, by birth or naturalization.

Mr. Pacyga, who also has represented other defendants in the fraud cases, said that some involved became convinced that state agencies were tolerating, if not tacitly allowing, the fraud.

“No one was doing anything about the red flags,” he said. “It was like someone was stealing money from the cookie jar and they kept refilling it.”

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‘A Core Voting Bloc’

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Words written on a whiteboard in different colors.

Whiteboards filled with cases and charges line the walls inside a room used by investigators to track fraud.Credit...Ben Brewer for The New York Times

Red flags in the meals program surfaced in the early months of the pandemic, but the money kept flowing.

In 2020, Minnesota Department of Education officials who administered the program became overwhelmed by the number of applicants seeking to register new feeding sites and began raising questions about the plausibility of some invoices.

Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit group that was the largest provider in the pandemic program, responded with a warning. In an email, the group told the state agency that failing to promptly approve new applicants from “minority-owned businesses” would result in a lawsuit featuring accusations of racism that would be “sprawled across the news.”

Feeding Our Future later sued the agency, which continued reimbursing claims and approving new sites in the months that followed.

A report by Minnesota’s nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor about the lapses that enabled the meals fraud later found that the threat of litigation and of negative press affected how state officials used their regulatory power.

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Kayseh Magan, a Somali American who formerly worked as a fraud investigator for the Minnesota attorney general’s office, said elected officials in the state — and particularly those who were part of the state’s Democratic-led administration — were reluctant to take more assertive action in response to allegations in the Somali community.

“There is a perception that forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash among the Somali community, which is a core voting bloc” for Democrats, said Mr. Magan, who is among the few prominent figures in the Somali community to speak about the fraud.

As a trial in the meals fraud case was coming to a close last summer, an attempt to bribe a juror included an explicit insinuation about racism, prosecutors said. Several defendants in the trial were found to have arranged to send a bag containing $120,000 to a juror along with a note that read, “Why, why, why is it always people of color and immigrants prosecuted for the fault of other people?”

Mr. Thompson, a career prosecutor who served as interim U.S. attorney for several months this year, and who declined to discuss his own political preferences, said he believed that race sensitivities had played a major role in the rise of fraud. As pandemic assistance was disbursed, the state was also reeling from the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, he said.

“This was a huge part of the problem,” Mr. Thompson said during an interview in the summer. “Allegations of racism can be a reputation or career killer.”

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Mr. Walz, Minnesota’s second-term governor who gained national attention last year as Kamala Harris’s running mate in a White House bid, said this week that claims of racism did not hinder his administration’s response to fraud.

Mr. Walz has said that his administration may have erred on the side of generosity during the pandemic as the state pushed out large sums of money quickly, seeking to keep Minnesotans housed, fed and healthy.

“The programs are set up to move the money to people,” Mr. Walz said in an interview. “The programs are set up to improve people’s lives, and in many cases, the criminals find the loopholes.”

Mr. Walz, who is seeking a third term next year, has created a new task force to pursue fraud cases; made it easier for state agencies to share information with one another; and announced plans for new technology, including artificial intelligence tools, to spot suspicious billing practices.

“The message here in Minnesota,” Mr. Walz said, “is if you commit a crime, if you commit fraud against public dollars, you are going to go to prison.”

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Fraud has already become a central issue in a competitive governor’s race. Lisa Demuth, a Republican and current Minnesota House speaker, accused the governor of raising taxes while letting “fraud run wild” in a video announcing her bid to replace Mr. Walz.

In recent months Mr. Walz’s administration began shutting down the housing program altogether, acknowledging that it was riddled with fraud. Last month the state hired an independent auditor to review claims for 14 other Medicaid-funded programs that the state said were at high risk of fraud.

“Greedy people and businesses have learned how to exploit our programs,” James Clark, the inspector general at the Department of Human Services, told lawmakers during a recent hearing. “Fraud is the business model.”

The Fallout

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Ahmed Samatar, in a tan jacket and red tie, crosses his arms.

Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College, said a reckoning over the fraud and its consequences for Minnesota was overdue.Credit...Ben Brewer for The New York Times

Years after the fraud cases first came to light, the issue has come under a harsh national spotlight amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

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Mr. Trump last week denounced the Minnesota fraud cases on social media and simultaneously announced an end to a temporary legal status that allows several hundred Somali immigrants to live and work in the United States.

His comments followed a report this month in the Manhattan Institute’s publication, City Journal, in which Ryan Thorpe, a reporter, and Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, said that money from Minnesota’s fraud was funding Al Shabab, a terrorist organization in Somalia. That claim emerged in 2018, but there has been no solid evidence to substantiate it, and none of the federal fraud cases have featured a link to terrorism.

Over the last few days, in response to the shooting of National Guard members in Washington, Mr. Trump has again spoken of Somalis in Minnesota, saying they were “ripping off our country.”

In Minnesota, Mr. Trump’s remarks deeply unsettled Somalis.

Dozens came to a Somali mall in Minneapolis over the weekend for a potluck and interfaith gathering, where faith leaders decried Mr. Trump's statements. And in a news conference on Monday, Democratic elected officials pointed to contributions Somali leaders have made to Minnesota’s political, economic and cultural spheres. Several Somali Americans serve in the State Legislature and other offices, while others have been honored for their entrepreneurship.

“We do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community,” Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat who was born in Somalia and whose district includes Minneapolis, told reporters.

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Somali residents were initially concentrated in a neighborhood near downtown Minneapolis with high-rises and Somali-run restaurants and shops, but over the years many have moved to the suburbs and elsewhere in the state.

Their experiences have been challenging at times as many in the community contended with poverty, unemployment and language barriers. In recent years, some Somali Americans say the community has been broadly blamed over crime and links to terrorist groups. Few episodes have left fissures as deep as the fraud scandal.

Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College who is a leading expert in Somali studies, said a reckoning over the fraud and its consequences for Minnesota was overdue.

“American society and the denizens of the state of Minnesota have been extremely good to Somalis,” said Dr. Samatar, who is Somali American.

Dr. Samatar said that Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.

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Minnesota, he said, proved susceptible to rampant fraud because it is “so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.”

Others in the community have criticized steps state agencies have taken to tighten oversight of programs. The Minnesota Somali Community Center, a nonprofit organization that provides resources to Somalis, recently issued a statement saying that many social services providers were now at risk of closure and feeling “criminalized and intentionally targeted.”

Still, other Somali Americans who have nothing to do with social service agencies said they had come to feel under siege amid all the fraud allegations and political accusations.

“The actions of a small group have made it easier for people already inclined to reject us to double down,” said Abdi Mohamed, a filmmaker in Minneapolis. “The broader Somali community — hardworking, family-oriented, deeply committed to Minnesota — is left carrying that burden.”

Ernesto Londoño is a Times reporter based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and drug use and counternarcotics policy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/fraud-minnesota-somali.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5800275&forum_id=2/#49470671)