Rachel Wolf writes for FoxNews.com about a disturbing revelation involving one Midwestern state’s tax dollars.
A new investigation found that Minnesota taxpayer dollars were going far beyond the North Star State’s borders and ending up in the hands of Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked terror group.
Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute uncovered a web of fraud involving Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program, Feeding Our Future and other organizations in a bombshell report. Thorpe and Rufo noted that, in many cases, members of Minnesota’s Somali community were perpetrators of fraud. They added that federal counterterrorism sources confirmed that millions of dollars in stolen funds were sent back to Somalia, which is how Al-Shabaab got the cash.
Thorpe and Rufo sought to answer a bigger question when looking into the schemes: “Where did the money go?”
As it turned out, the Somali fraud rings sent money transfers from Minnesota to Somalia and, according to reports, approximately 40% of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. Thorpe and Rufo state that in 2023, the Somali diaspora sent $1.7 billion to the country, which was higher than the Somali government’s budget that same year.
Thorpe and Rufo discovered that the funds were being funneled to Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked terror organization. Multiple law enforcement sources informed the duo that Minnesota’s Somali community sent millions of dollars through a network of money traders known as “hawalas” that wound up in the hands of the terror group.
Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, told Thorpe and Rufo that the Somalis ran a complex money network and were routing cash on commercial flights from the Seattle airport to the hawala networks in Somalia.
“We had sources going into the hawalas to send money. I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well s—, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits,” Kerns told Thorpe and Rufo.
