Every day, it seems, the American people are learning more about how much they have been victimized and defrauded by the country’s broken immigration and welfare systems.
In the latest shocking development, City Journal’s Chris Rufo reported this week that Somali migrants in Minneapolis have stolen “millions of dollars” in welfare funds, which have then “been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab.” As one source told Rufo, “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”
The scale of the fraud that Rufo describes is staggering – and it has all apparently come to light only thanks to the Trump administration finally looking into the matter. The Minnesota government, under the leadership of failed vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, has allowed the massive theft to metastasize for years unabated.
One of the most heinous scams used fake autism diagnoses to fleece Medicaid for hundreds of millions of dollars. Here’s how it works: First, fraudsters set up fake autism treatment centers; then, they “recruit” Somali parents to enroll their children in the centers (even if the children don’t have autism, the fraudsters supply a fake diagnosis); finally, the fraudsters collect Medicaid payouts for children with autism – and give parents kickbacks of up to $1,500 per month.
As a result, “autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years – from $3 million in 2018… to $399 million in 2023.” Even more damningly, “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.”
The largest single scam that law enforcement officials have uncovered involves Feeding Our Future, “a small Minnesota nonprofit that sponsored daycares and after-school programs to enroll in the Federal Child Nutrition Program.” Most of the groups that received money from Feeding Our Future were run by members of the Minnesota Somali community.
Before the pandemic, Feeding Our Future received about $3.4 million in federal funding. But then, after the pandemic began, the group began using fake meal counts and invoices to collect exponentially more funds – to the tune of $200 million in 2021 alone.
That money was then used “to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya.” Several individuals implicated in the scam notably “donated to, or appeared publicly with, Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman from Minneapolis,” while failed mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, also Somali, “lobbied Governor Tim Walz in support of the program.”
In yet another massive fraud web, at least a half dozen members of the Minneapolis Somali community have been charged with setting up fake companies to take advantage of the state’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services (HSS) program. HSS is supposed to provide housing assistance to those in need, and officials estimated it would cost around $2.6 million annually.
But costs “quickly spiraled out of control” – $21 million in 2021, $42 million in 2022, $74 million in 2023, and an eye-popping $104 million in 2024. That money was going to “purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system.”
But it didn’t stop with the Somalis in America. As Rufo reports, huge amounts of it went back to Somalia – to the point where remittances from the United States are now a sizable portion of the Somali economy. An astonishing 40 percent of households in Somalia receive remittances from abroad, and “in 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion – more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.”
It would be one thing if that money was earned through legitimate economic endeavors. But it wasn’t. Most of it was outright stolen from taxpayers, a theft enabled by Democrat leaders who were either too incompetent to realize it or complicit in the crimes (perhaps a little of both). There is effectively no way to get that money back.
Even more outrageously, Rufo’s report reveals for the first time that some of the money Somalis stole from American taxpayers went directly into the pockets of Al-Shabaab, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.
“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,” a former government official told Rufo. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, Al-Shabaab is… taking a cut of it.”
It is likely that none of this would have been revealed had Donald Trump not won re-election last November and filled the U.S. Attorney’s offices in Minnesota with lawyers actually interested in investigating and prosecuting crimes. The fact that the fraud was allowed to grow to the scale that it did before any arrests were made is an indictment on the Biden administration, Tim Walz, and every Democrat who runs Minnesota.
But the most shocking fact of all may be that this report is only the tip of the iceberg. In the weeks and months ahead, Americans are likely to learn even more about just how much they are being robbed and ripped off.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
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