Minnesota Welfare Fraud: it’s not just Minnesota, and it’s not just Somalians, and it's not limited to welfare, but together, they’re putting on a pretty good show

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For instance, these young entrepreneurs also run “multi-state sex-trafficking rings”

Here are some snippets from a lengthy article on what’s been going on (and continues to go on) up in the Gopher State:

City Journal

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.

  • 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 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.”

  • 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.

…. 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.”

…. . 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.

  • …. 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.

….

“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.”

….

Gaither, the former state senator, said … 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.

Mind you, these fine people do have their defenders:

Ilhan Omar: 'Somalis Have Always Been the Fabric of This Nation