Minnesota Somalia Diaspora Engulfed in Fraud

Minnesota Somalia Diaspora Engulfed in Fraud

If you must politicize a family affair, talk about Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo’s new investigative report for City Journal this Thanksgiving. The piece details how a tribal community, which moved into the Minnesota welfare state, defrauded the taxpayer and funded terrorism back home in Somalia. The authors explained:

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.

Minneapolis Somalians turned out to be creative and prolific fraudsters. Their exploits are so massive that they incriminate nearly the entire diaspora in America. For instance, one shadowy figure, Asha Farhan Hassan, recruited Somalian children into faux “culturally appropriate” autism therapy programs and facilitated fraudulent diagnoses when needed. The rate of autism in the community soared to one in sixteen, or three times the state average. Autism claims to Minnesota Medicaid rose from $3 million in 2018 to $399 million in 2023.

Minnesota designed Housing Stabilization Services as a “low barrier to entry” program, requiring little documentation to secure housing for at-risk individuals. When it went live in 2020, the estimated annual cost stood at $2.6 million. When it was terminated on August 1 this year due to fraud, it paid $61 million this year alone.

The Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, Joe Thompson, believes that the “vast majority” of claims were criminal. On September 16, he indicated eight individuals, six of them from the Somali community. Thompson noted “purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system”—the level of fraud he’d never seen before. The defendants allegedly enrolled individuals who recently completed rehabs with no intention of providing them with living accommodations.

Then there is Feeding Our Future, an NGO with close ties to the U.S. Representative from Minnesota Ilhan Omar. Feeding Our Future contracted with the Federal Child Nutrition Program— their  $3.4 million federal grant in 2019 ballooned to $200 million in 2021.

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 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 a press release, Thompson spoke of theft of “billions” in a “web” of conspiracies. Thorpe and Rufo counted 28 schemes busted since 2019, most of them involving Somalians. More unnerving than the scale of the enterprise is the fact that a large amount of taxpayer funds ended up in Somalia. Remittances from the diaspora flush more into the economy of the East African nation than the entire government budget. And, as the authors note:

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, formerly of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Somalians living off government benefits sent money home, suggesting fraud. Furthermore, the funds were transferred using Al-Shabaab networks, enabling the terror group to dip into American wealth. Moreover, Thorpe and Rufo confirmed that a number of Somalians in Minnesota traveled to the Horn of Africa to join the group in question.

City Journal delved into the reasons corruption and terrorist sponsorship took place on Minnesota soil. Naiveté and cowardice of our elected officials are culprits, but it’s the Somalians themselves who are directly responsible for the fraud. To find out why, we have to look into their tribal culture.

American society is built of mobile, extreme nuclear families living in detached homes. Somalians, on the other hand, sprout polygamous households complete with distantly related individuals around the globe. Take, for instance, Ilhan Omar, who came to the United States with her father, admitted as a refugee despite her father being Soviet-trained military. She is widely believed to have married her brother to bring him from London. Such family arrangements yield an ideological outlook sharply different from ours.

Nationalism is a Western political ideology; in the Third World, religion and blood ties typically override national identity. Expecting Somalians, for no particular reasons other than landing on our soil, to shed their concrete ancient folkways in favor of abstraction like American patriotism is unrealistic. As political commentator Mark Steyn remarked in reference to the City Journal expose:

The Wanker Right thinks that, simply by setting foot on American soil, a Somali clitoridectomist becomes a devotee of the Federalist papers. The Somali clitoridectomist thinks that, au contraire, simply by setting foot on American soil in sufficient numbers, America becomes more Somali.

Considering the scope and severity of the situation, solutions are hard to come by. Thorpe and Rufo explained how the Somalian community, though not particularly numerous, completely warped Minnesota politics, subduing media and power figures—one can’t win Minneapolis without them, and can’t win the state without Minneapolis.

Nevertheless, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, himself connected to Somali fraudsters, found a way to exploit clan divisions among his constituents, besting the Somali candidate Omar Fateh this November. Promising government largess, Frey visited local mosques and campaigned in Somalia. Is that our future?

On Twitter/X, Rufo proposed a common sense solution:

We need mass deportations from Little Mogadishu, Minnesota, to Mogadishu, Somalia. We cannot accept a population that systematically defrauds American taxpayers and sends bags of cash to terrorists abroad. Anyone who does not already have citizenship has to go back.

Reacting to the story, President Trump announced that he’s withdrawing Temporary Protected Status from the 705 Somalians living in the U.S.  The entire Somali community in America numbers around 170,000.

Cancelling visas for non-citizens should be uncontroversial, but it leaves open the question about what to do with Somalians who, like Ilhan Omar, already obtained American citizenship, perhaps fraudulently. After all, the Somalian refugee program was cancelled in the 2000s after DNA testing revealed nearly 100% fraud.

The Trump Administration has been enormously successful in deporting criminal illegal aliens. However, our most important immigration battle is with legal immigrants who don’t fit easily in our society and endanger our way of life.

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