Editors at National Review Online assess a major scandal in a blue Midwestern state.
The nation is finally awakening to an ongoing scandal of massive proportions in Minnesota, where state taxpayers have had somewhere north of $1 billion stolen from them by concentric rings of welfare fraudsters based in and around Minneapolis’s tightly knit Somali diaspora community. It is a story with far deeper implications than the mere loss of dollars and cents, one that implicates our national immigration policy, among other things. But let us first note the depth of the fraud and how long it was ignored by the media at large — although not by our friends at Power Line who have been following it from the beginning and especially Scott Johnson, who has covered the trials.
In September 2022, the federal government began to indict multiple sets of Minneapolis-area Somali Americans on charges of defrauding Minnesota welfare and public-assistance programs. First came the Feeding Our Future scandal, where (to date) 75 defendants associated with the Somali “charitable” organization allegedly chose to feed on the sudden flood of post-2020 Covid-era relief money available to anyone willing to claim a vaguely eleemosynary cause. (Feeding Our Future was able to hoover up millions of dollars of Covid funding with the promise of “providing school lunches” to disadvantaged children in the Twin Cities Somali community.)
The FBI raided their fake “meal locations” in January of 2022; the federal indictments have been piling up since then. But this turns out to have been only one of multiple government-fraud schemes emerging from the Twin Cities Somali community during the Covid era. On September 18, federal prosecutors also dropped the first in a wave of indictments, against eight defendants for defrauding the state’s Housing Stabilization Services program to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
There are more webs of fraud yet to untangle, and it seems they penetrate the entire local Somali community.
