Minnesota’s Massive Somali Fraud Shows the U.S. Needs a Remigration Policy
When my German immigrant ancestors arrived in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were refugees fleeing a homeland devastated by war. They were also drawn by the promise of opportunity in the newly formed territories of the American Midwest. They were poor, spoke limited English, and formed ethnic enclaves where they settled, eventually putting down permanent roots in Minnesota. At least in these respects, they share a superficial similarity to a more recent group of Minnesota immigrants hailing from the Horn of Africa.
That is where the similarities between Somalis and American immigrants of the past end.
Unlike my ancestors, the Somalis did not come to the United States to work. They came to America to become government dependents and clients of the Democratic Party. The overwhelming majority of the roughly quarter-million Somalis in the United States are an economic drain on the states where they reside. In Minnesota, more than four-fifths of Somalis are dependent on welfare, compared with only one-fifth of the native population. Nearly three-fourths are on Medicaid, compared with 19 percent of the general population.
As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s now been revealed that Minnesota’s Somali community has exploited the state’s generous welfare system to steal a staggering amount of taxpayer money—possibly $9 billion or more, in what may turn out to be the largest mass fraud in American history. They’ve done this by creating hundreds of fake social service businesses that each rake in millions of dollars through the state’s welfare programs by pretending to run childcare, healthcare, and food assistance programs. These exist only on paper and in empty office buildings with locked doors and blacked-out windows, as the YouTube journalist Nick Shirley showed recently in a viral documentary.
“The fraud is not small, it isn’t isolated,” Joseph Thompson, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, told reporters in a mid-December press conference. “The magnitude cannot be overstated. What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s a staggering, industrial-scale fraud. It’s swamping Minnesota and calling into question everything we know about our state.”
Thompson said that, unlike typical welfare fraud, the Somali variety in Minnesota is unique in that the organizations involved are entirely fraudulent. In other words, these are not just social service organizations fudging their numbers; their entire operations have been created to defraud taxpayers. The Somalis behind these scams have used their ill-gotten gains to purchase luxury cars and jewelry, take expensive vacations in Dubai, and buy real estate in Somalia and in Somali enclaves in Kenya. They’ve also funneled the money back to Somalia to fund political groups there. Federal prosecutors are investigating a report by City Journal alleging that some of the money was even used to finance the Somali Muslim terrorist group al-Shabaab.
This fraud is still ongoing, Thompson said. His office identified 14 Medicaid programs that are compromised, and the spigots of taxpayer money are still flowing to fraudsters. One program, Housing Stabilization Services, designed to provide housing for the elderly and disabled, was so rife with fraud that the state shut it down entirely. Thompson said his team cannot keep up with all the new fraud cases emerging in Minnesota, and described what is already a fraud of historic national proportions as the “tip of the iceberg.”
Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison repeatedly ignored the warnings of state employees. “The whistleblowers that I’ve spoken to are saying that the governor knew … and scolded them for pointing out fraud.” Republican State Rep. Marion Rarick told reporters. U.S. House Oversight Committee Chairman said that “neither Walz nor Ellison were willing to do anything about it, for political reasons, because this has become a major base for the Democrat Party in Minnesota.”
The Somali exploitation of welfare programs is not just happening in Minnesota. Steven Robinson, Editor in Chief of The Maine Wire, appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show to describe similar abuse of welfare services by Somalis living in Lewiston, Maine. “So much of Maine’s Medicaid rules have been rewritten by Democrat lawmakers with a view to transferring wealth from middle-class white Mainers to migrant communities, that much of what has happened over the last 20 years is actually legal. It’s not fair to call it fraud,” Robinson said. He described a self-reinforcing circle in which Democrats funnel taxpayer money into NGOs providing welfare services to Somalis. The NGOs then usher the Somalis into the Democratic machine, registering them to vote and mobilizing them politically.
It is this participation in the Democratic Party’s political machine that has given Somalis outsized political power in the Democratic-run metro areas where they live. Somalis have managed to gain this influence despite being only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population. As they’ve grown in power in Minneapolis, Columbus, Ohio, and Lewiston, Maine, the local Democratic mayors and police chiefs have been repeatedly captured on camera begging the Somali population for support.
Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the U.S., which has reached 108,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2024, Minnesota Governor Walz changed the state’s flag, which had featured a farmer plowing a field, to a star on a light blue background. The new flag is suspiciously similar to the Somali flag.
Last month, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey ordered Minneapolis police not to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who are investigating Somali illegals. He addressed the city’s Somalis in their own language in front of the cameras, then, in a typically groveling display, ate at a Somali restaurant in Minneapolis, where he struggled to choke down the food.
Minnesota’s largest city almost acquired a far-left, ultra-woke Somali mayor when Frey faced a serious challenge from a Somali state legislator, Omar Fateh, before his re-election in November. Fateh initially won an endorsement of the state Democratic Party against Frey, the sitting Democratic mayor, but that endorsement was revoked due to “substantial voting failures.” Fateh also had to return campaign donations received from Feeding Our Future, one of the Somali welfare scam programs.
One gets the impression that the Democratic leaders of Minnesota, Maine, and Ohio have unleashed a Somali Frankenstein monster. The fraud is so endemic and self-reinforcing that the federal government needs to step in to shut down the Somali fraudsters and investigate their Democratic political enablers. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is so firmly entrenched in these locations that such an investigation will be hard to pursue.
More needs to be done in Congress. The key phrase of 2025 was “self-deportation,” as millions of illegal immigrants voluntarily left amid an ICE crackdown. The keyword of 2026 should be “remigration.” American legislators need to confront the fact that first-generation immigrants from Somalia and other Third World countries are a net detriment to America. Legislation should be passed to allow authorities to take away citizenship from first-generation legal immigrants who commit crimes and who exploit America’s welfare system without contributing anything of value to our nation. To quote President Trump on this subject:
They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you, okay? Someone will say, ‘Oh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.