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
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.
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.
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.”
To which another wryly noted:
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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