… but way too many of them bring Somali corruption with them. In Minnesota, it reached terrible proportions, and we’re still finding out its extent:
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.”
Incredibly depressing news – although it’s not really all that new as news, since we’ve been hearing about it piece by piece for quite some time (I’ve written about one of these cases previously, for example here and here).
More:
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.
That is what happens when naive virtue-signalers set up such a program. It becomes overrun by fraud, especially when dealing with people with a third-world mentality who consider the bureaucrats easy marks – which they indeed are. The simple truth is that all people bring their culture with them, and they either reject it or continue it when they get here. There are so many Somalis concentrated in Minnesota that apparently assimilation is not all that common. The result is rampant fraud.
And when I say “rampant,” that’s exactly what I mean. This fraud was very organized and sophisticated. Too bad all that energy wasn’t challenged into something more constructive – although it was very constructive indeed for the fraudsters:
“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.”
Another fraudulent scheme involved autism claims:
… [O]n 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.
It involved much of the Somali community, because the parents got kickbacks. And get this:
Often, parents threatened to leave . . . and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.
Nice. As one might imagine, autism claims in Minnesota went through the roof. Hey, maybe it’s even responsible for the supposed rise in autism rates in general – it’s certainly responsible for the increase in Minnesota. This is the sort of increase we’re talking about:
… [A]utism 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.
Did no one notice? Or was it too unwoke to notice? This guy is noticing, and he’s Somali:
Kayesh Magan, a Somali-American who had worked as a fraud investigator at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office and declined an interview request, 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.”
If you follow the money, what do you find? It leads back to Somalia:
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. …
“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.”
I have quoted liberally from the article because the whole picture is staggering.
Somalis have what’s called “temporary protected status” in the US, but there’s little about it that’s temporary. In fact, Somalis have had that status since a 1991 civil war broke out in Somalia. Not all Somalis are here under that program – in fact, the majority are not – but Trump would like to end it, which seems extremely reasonable, and has declared it over.
Here’s how CBS treats the news:
[Trump] also accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, without proof, of overseeing a state that had become a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”
Without proof? There’s a ton of proof, but CBS assumes its readers are unaware of that.
