Trump Axes Temporary Protected Status for Somalis in Minnesota
“In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion — more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.”
President Donald Trump announced he was terminating deportation protections for Somalis in Minnesota “effective immediately.”
In a Friday night post on Truth Social, the president wrote:
Minnesota, under Governor Waltz, is a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity. I am, as President of the United States, hereby terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota. Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER! President DJT
🚨 HOLY SMOKES
Trump revokes Temporary Protected Status for Somalis in Minnesota. They can now be deported.
“It’s OVER!” pic.twitter.com/uaLJANSH1f
— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) November 22, 2025
Trump’s announcement comes after an investigation conducted by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo of The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, uncovered massive Medicaid fraud that allegedly involved funneling millions of dollars in Minnesota taxpayer funds to entities in Somalia.
Reportedly, a portion of these funds went to the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab.
Thorpe and Rufo detailed their findings on Wednesday in a City Journal article appropriately titled The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer.
The report begins with an overview of the vast scope of Minnesota’s welfare system, which the authors argue has, by its very design, made the state especially susceptible to fraud.
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.
Housing Stabilization Services Fraud (HSS)
The HSS program, intended to help the vulnerable “secure housing,” was created with “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.” When HHS was established in 2020, administrators estimated it would cost taxpayers $2.6 million per year. Costs have ballooned far beyond projections. During the first half of 2025, HHS paid out $61 million, putting it on track for a new record.
Minnesota’s Department of Human Services tried to shut the program down in August after terminating dozens of providers over “credible allegations of fraud.” Joe Thompson, then-Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, said that the “vast majority” of the HSS program was fraudulent, involving shell companies, fabricated services, and schemes tied to other Medicaid programs.
Federal prosecutors charged a group of individuals at the time, the majority of whom were Somali Minnesotans. More arrests are expected.
During a press conference announcing the indictments, Thompson told reporters, “Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling. 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.”
According to the report:
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.”
Links to the Feeding Our Future Scandal
Thorpe and Rufo link this case to the recent Feeding Our Future scandal, in which defendants stole $250 million in federal child-nutrition funds through fake meal claims and inflated attendance records. Federal officials say many organizations involved were operated by Somali Minnesotans.
The report quotes former Minnesota State Sen. David Gaither, who said that when members of the Somali community come under legal scrutiny, they typically respond by alleging racial bias. He noted, “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.”
Autism Services Fraud
The most shocking part of the report involved a separate indictment for alleged fraud within Minnesota’s autism-therapy program. Prosecutors say defendants recruited Somali families, sometimes arranging fraudulent diagnoses and paying kickbacks to parents to inflate Medicaid claims. Autism-related Medicaid spending and the number of providers — many Somali-owned — rose sharply in a short span.
In September, Asha Farhan Hassan became the first person to be indicted in this scheme for her role in a $14 million fraud.
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.
A press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office stated:
To drive up enrollment, Hassan and her partners paid monthly cash kickback payments to the parents of children who enrolled. 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.
Thorpe and Rufo reported:
[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.
🚨 BREAKING: A massive scandal is erupting in Minnesota as Somalians in the state artificially surged their rates of autism to fraudulently gain Medicaid funding…
…and then sent the money to terror organization al-Shabaab.
Tim Walz's Minnesota has MASSIVE problems.
To the… pic.twitter.com/hmxbBlsacU
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 20, 2025
Thorpe and Rufo note that “the most surprising aspect of the Somalia fraud story is the scale, with total costs running into the billions of taxpayer dollars.”
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.
Law Enforcement Claims Regarding Remittances and Terror Finance
The article cites several former law-enforcement officials who claim that significant amounts of fraud proceeds were sent overseas through hawalas — informal money transfer networks common in the Somali diaspora. These sources assert that Al-Shabaab takes a cut from remittances entering Somalia, regardless of senders’ intentions.
It is one thing to show compassion; it is quite another to turn a blind eye to allegations that Minnesota taxpayers may be indirectly supporting an al-Qaeda–linked group.
EXCLUSIVE: @RK_Thorpe and I have new reporting on America’s Somali fraud rings, which have stolen billions in taxpayer funds—and sent some to Islamist terrorists back home.
“The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer.”https://t.co/RDgnKXAnyP
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) November 19, 2025
One X user points out that there are only 705 Somalians on TPS inside the U.S.
Clearly, while Trump’s termination of TPS for Somalis is a start, his administration must find other ways to deport “larger numbers.” The user suggests targeting those who have “falsified documents or committed crime[s], and denaturaliz[ing] them.”
Unfortunately there are only 705 on TPS nationwide. To remove larger numbers, they’re going to have to go after the ones that falsified documents or committed crime, and denaturalize them.
— Made In Detroit (@neenee_dee1) November 22, 2025
To which another wryly noted:
Like marrying their own brother
— Donald Ramsey (@DonaldR1963) November 22, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
Somalis own that state.
The fraud
Changing the state flag
Sending Ilhan Omar to Congress
Just deport all the non native born.
Almost all the non-native born are naturalized citizens, and there’s no basis for supposing that their naturalizations were invalid. Perhaps in some individual cases that may be so, but in general it’s almost certainly not.
I really don’t care. Some of them are probably involved in this fraud and others just stood by while fraud was commited. So if they commited fraud, just unnaturalize them and deport them.
There is no such thing as “unnaturalize them”. If they’re genuinely US citizens — and there’s no basis for supposing they aren’t — then they cannot be deported no matter what they do.
You are wrong as always: there is a legal distinction between U.S. citizenship acquired by birth and citizenship acquired through naturalization. If someone is a natural-born U.S. citizen, their citizenship cannot be revoked under any circumstances. But naturalized citizenship can be revoked in specific situations — such as fraud during the naturalization process, concealment of material facts, or certain disqualifying actions that occurred before or shortly after naturalization. So while you can’t “un-citizen” someone who was born American, revocation is possible for naturalized citizens when the law allows it.
No, there is no distinction between citizenship by birth and by naturalization. The constitution says they’re equal.
In none of these cases is anything being revoked. In all of these cases the naturalization was invalid, so the person was never a citizen in the first place. Even if you only discover this years later, all it means is that the person has been falsely impersonating a citizen all these years.
It’s exactly like discovering that a marriage was invalid. Annulment doesn’t revoke the marriage, it determines that there never was a marriage.
Events that occur after a naturalization that was valid at the time can’t possibly make it invalid, and therefore can’t be the basis for the misleadingly-labeled “denaturalization”.
The only use such events can be is to provide evidence of a disqualification that existed before the naturalization. If someone swears loyalty to the USA, and five minutes later is observed reporting to his bosses in the KGB, then that proves his oath was fraudulent because he was already working for the KGB. Whereas the same thing five years later doesn’t prove anything, because he might have joined the KGB after he was already a citizen.
In none of these cases is anything being revoked. In all of these cases the naturalization was invalid, so the person was never a citizen in the first place. Even if you only discover this years later, all it means is that the person has been falsely impersonating a citizen all these years.
Semantic games.
Their immigration was fraudulently accelerated, and I have reason to believe their citizenships were fraudulently accelerated as well.
What does “fraudulently accelerated” even mean, and who committed this alleged fraud? At the time of their naturalization, were they legally eligible for it? What reason do you have to believe otherwise?
Perhaps instead of putting them in jail here they should just be transported back home if found guilty and put on a high notice list at points of entry if they try to get in again. Of course, if they come in on night flights ala Biden, that kind of creates another problem.
They will lie to your face. I was rear-ended by a Somali driver. I should’ve taken a photo at the scene, but there were five lanes of traffic backed up, so I thought well, we’ll settle in the parking lot. The man looked me in the eye and said it’ was fault but he didn’t have all the information was needed. After it was settled, and I had to pay for my own damages because I was accused of cutting in front of him, which was utterly impossible at the time, he said I never said it was my fault. He did straight to my face.
On a lower level, I was told by number of members of the community, and no, I cannot identify them anymore because I have been detached from them for quite a while That they could have a business and earn up to $25,000 a year, but could still claim all the welfare benefits. It’s a mess. You are correct in identifying the Democrat party structure in Minnesota has made this situation just balloon.
They’re almost all citizens, so they can’t be deported. If they’re caught ripping off the taxpayer they must be treated the same as any other US citizen caught doing the same thing — put in prison.
Tim Walz.
Talk about “two bullets to the head,” that’s what the USA dodged last November.
My understanding is that the Minnesota officials deliberately turn a blind eye to all this fraud (including any vote fraud btw) not only because were they deathly afraid of being called bigots – but because Solami’s are voting –
both (some) legally and (some) illegally.
Enuf that (D)s can’t carry the Minneapolis area if (S)s didn’t vote for (D)s.
And without Minneapolis they might not win state-wide either.
Given the choice between doing their job to use tax moneys to support Minnesota citizens or ensuring re-election Waltz et alia always chose door #2.
The vast majority of Somalis in Minnesota are citizens, so they’re voting legally. And yes, that is one reason officials are deliberately ignoring their crimes until they become too big to pretend away.
Yep. The real work is gonna be identifying true fraud and punishing the fraudsters perhaps even with denaturalization and deportation but denaturalization is not a simple proposition. Start with invalidating ALL the SSDI autism claims generated from the area clinics under suspicion. Blacklist the providers by personal name as well as corporate name refusing Federal funding to any entity that hires them to perform any similar functions in the medical field from MD down to receptionists and billing code data entry specialists.
Even better is expanding the ‘public charge rule’ to prohibit any/all Federal funding direct or indirect to support anyone who isn’t a US Citizen or lawful permanent resident Alien who’ve passed a five year anniversary from grant of green card. If States or NGO want to do so they can BUT only by creating a completely separate, parallel system so that no Federal funds can be co-mingled down to separate application forms and different addresses, employees, websites, phone #, phone trees to have complete separation from Federal funds. Or not their choice.
This wouldn’t help much because almost all the Somalis in Minnesota are citizens, and the majority were born here.
Especially in the case of the autism fraud, the children who are being diagnosed are US citizens, so the “public charge” rule can’t be invoked.
One partial fix is for Congress to redefine all benefits for minors, to specify that minors themselves are never eligible for any benefit, but rather their parents are eligible in respect of them. That way if the parents are aliens they would not be eligible, even though the child is a citizen.
But that’s only a partial fix.
It wouldn’t help to invalidate ALL the SSDI awards based on Autism diagnosis generated through these ‘fraud mill clinics’ then blacklisting the shady folks who ran them?
1. It immediately stops funds going out the door for fraudulent claims.
2. Prevents future fraud from the crop of shady folks
3. Forces everyone who received a fraudulent or potentially fraudulent diagnosis to be reevaluated by other providers not associated with the fraud mill clinics
4. Anyone who doesn’t reapply we can presume was fraudulent and force them to undergo revaluation to investigate fraud.
5. Any revaluation (voluntary or involuntary) showing the prior diagnosis was fraudulent gets hit with criminal charges and required to repay SSDI benefits. Seize assets to do it.
6. Any fraudulent claim prior to naturalization is grounds to reevaluate the decision to grant Citizenship or green card.
I like your solution but would modify it to make it more broad and more easily enforced. Change public charge rule to apply to both individuals AND Households. So if anyone in the Household is ineligible then EVERYONE in the Household is ineligible. Send inspectors to the home and if somebody is allowing their ineligible cousin or boyfriend or whatever to ‘stay’ then revoke the benefits for the entire household. Apply the same to US Citizen households where Sec 8 restrictions are often ignored. Any beneficiaries hit by this would lose their own eligibility for 12 months and that 12 months would be counted against their ‘lifetime limit’.
Looks like the pirates have left Somali waters for more easier pickings – the Minnesotan taxpayer.
Deport all now. Sort later. Maybe 50 years or so.
Ho you pary on services for children with autims is beyond nauseating. To quote my new favorite politician; Mamdopey-I don’t think the US tax payer should be funding this genocide. Execpt in Somalia it’s a real one of course.
Dark money
I’m ok with calling me the “R” word, ship these anti-American primitive thieves back to their Islamic crap hole.
“Self policing” might have helped if the population was more concerned with maintaining law, order and citizenship pathway. One can say that so many in their community had more allegiance to the tribe than to the country that had given them the chance. Two key factors…. tribe and “religion”.
This only covers 700-odd people, and as far as I know there’s no indication that any of those people were involved in any of these frauds.
The Somali community in Minnesota is about 86,000 people, almost all US citizens, and the majority born here. So deportation is not an option.
As I have pointed out many times here, US citizenship, once validly obtained, can never be revoked for any reason. The process called “denaturalization” is very misleadingly named, because it does not denaturalize anyone. It consists rather in proving that a person was never naturalized in the first place.
That is no different from proving that someone who had been thought to be a citizen by birth was in fact not born here. Or that terrorist woman a few years ago, who was born here, but the government proved that at the time she was born her family had diplomatic immunity and therefore she was never a US citizen.
In exactly the same way, if someone has been holding themselves out as a naturalized citizen, and then it transpires that they never were one, either because they never had a naturalization ceremony at all, or because the ceremony was legally invalid, then they are not “denaturalized”, they are simply discovered to be what they were all along — aliens.
The bottom line, however, is that once someone is validly naturalized, with no fraud or forgery involved, then they are a citizen for as long as they want, and nothing they do can change that. They could go and join ISIS and fight against the USA — they’d be guilty of treason, but could not lose their citizenship. Nor could any fraud lose them their citizenship, so long as the citizenship itself is not fraudulent.
So the suggestion that “To remove larger numbers, they’re going to have to go after the ones that falsified documents or committed crime, and denaturalize them” is not valid. The only falsified documents that would be useful would be the ones with which they obtained their citizenship; if those documents were not falsified, no other falsified documents are relevant.
Nor are any crimes they may have committed, whether by ripping off millions of taxpayer dollars, or marrying a sibling. They’re subject to the same rules as any other US citizen who commits such crimes, but that’s all. They can’t ever be deported for them.